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Neighbors

Neighbors

Movie
Studio(s): 
Director(s): 
Genre: 
On Blu-Ray: 
Tuesday, September 23, 2014
Grade:
D+
Running Time: 
194 minutes
Bonus Features

Deleted Scenes, Gag Reel, Alternate Scenes, The Frat, Digital Copy, DVD Copy, and more

PLOT:
Mac (played by Seth Rogen) and Kelly Radner (played by Rose Byrne) are new parents, they are a young couple, and they still want to have fun and be cool. But when a frat buys the house next door to them, Mac and Kelly have to make the decision, be cool or be the old people that call the cops on their neighbors. It don't take long for Teddy Sanders (played by Zac Efron) and Pete Regazolli (played by Dave Franco), the heads of Delta Psi, to throw their first party. Mac and Kelly go over to tell their new neighbors, in a cool way, to turn down the music. Before the night is over the four are all having fun at the party and becoming friends. Things turn for the worse when another party is thrown where the music is once again loud and Mac calls the cops on the frat. War is declared and the two neighbors pull out all the stops to bring down the other as one side feels betrayed and the other feels attacked. Who will win, who will lose, it's all up in the air, literally with the use of well placed airbags cause Mac to go flying through the air as the neighbors battle it out.
 
TO LAUGH OR NOT TO LAUGH:
When the trailers for this movie was shown before it was out in the theaters, I remember thinking that it wasn't going to be one of those movies that had the majority of the best parts in the trailer. Well, I was right. Maybe I wasn't in the right mood or mind set because I didn't find this movie funny at all and I might have laughed 3 times during the whole thing and one of those laughs had nothing to do with the movie, it was during the credits. Comedies are not the easiest movies to make, anything can make them go from being one of the funniest things you've seen to being a flop. What I find funny might not be what you find funny. Me I love the joke where one person will scream and because that person is screaming someone else will start screaming. Why I find this funny I don't know I just do, I also find it funny when someone gets scared or shocked by something and goes running off but does that mean others find either of these as funny as I do? No.


So, maybe Neighbors was funny to you, I know a friend at work told me he found it really funny, but me, I found it bland and boring. Here's the biggest problem with this movie. There's too many story lines going on and none of them are ever fleshed out. The way the movies begins it has the story getting set up as if the main two characters, Mac and Kelly, are going to be that young couple with their first baby who are still in the party mindset but also trying to be the good parents. This setup is where the movie was going to be about them trying to balance the parenthood thing with their wanting to party but before that can go anywhere past the setup stage, the new neighbors are introduced.


Now we get a story that is being built up to be about the older married couple that want to party but don't want to do it all night and as long as the college kids keep the music down then things are cool. Which seems to be the course as the two groups come together to party with each other and become friends. But then it becomes a movie about revenge as the college kids feel betrayed by Mac and Kelly. Which the trailers make this movie look like it was going to be about the college kids and the married couple going to war because one is young and one is older. It's kind of that but it's not, and that's what I'm saying here is that this movie tried to have too many plot twists. Not only are there the two I just talked about, but there's also one that involves the college friends, Teddy and Pete getting in a fight with each other where there could have been a movie about how they deal with that situation, then another plot line where they are now showing how Teddy is the dumber one and how Pete is going to go somewhere in life and Teddy is now feeling down about it.


There's just so many things happening in this movie, all the different plot lines that could have been used as one movie, the battle that is as times just some harmless practical jokes, one moment it's revenge driven, and another where it's becoming a mean and dangerous duel to get one side split up and the other kicked out. Oh there's also the story line where the frat is trying to throw the best party ever to be put into the history of the frat but that is also never fully explored. What this movie seems like to me is that there was an idea of having the battle between the college kids vs. the parents, then that had to grow from idea to script and how this was done, was they first put in the things that the two do to each other then wrote the story around it but as one idea formed another idea formed from that one and instead of just telling the whole story of one or two of those idea, I was given a movie with the start of a bunch of ideas and the endings to none of them.


Also, why didn't Teddy's and Pete's side get shown in this movie?  We get glimpses into what makes them friends but we never get their side of the story beyond feeling betrayed but never what they do to set up their jokes. It's shown how Mac and Kelly work out their plans to take down the frat but the only time that the frats side is shown doing something it's not to plan out a way to get back at Mac and Kelly, it was a way to raise money to keep the house. Which by the way, the crude jokes, like the mold making scene, which is the scene that is the only one shown of the frat doing something, it's not funny. There's a lot of useless scenes in this movie and not enough of the actual main idea of the battle between the two. How the battle between the two houses are set up are like this, we're told there's a joke then given the punch line. No middle or anything of the joke is actually told, just the ending of it. Does that make a joke funny? No, and that's what happens here, lots of build up for jokes, a punch line given, but it's not funny.
 
BLU RAY:
Though the movie itself wasn't funny to me, the way this movie looks is quite good. The quality of the picture is sharp and clear with details standing out clearly. This movie looks natural and real but with clear sharp detail to the picture. The colors are even levels where they aren't too bright but they also stand out when they need to, the blacks don't have any noise or grain in them, and the contrast between shadows and lights is nice and even. Audio levels are the best feature of the Blu Ray as everything is just as sharp and clear as the picture is. Though there aren't that many special features on this, there are the good ones like the deleted scenes and a gag reel, and for me that's two of the best features to be given.
 
ACTING:
Seth Rogan is one of those actors that can be both good and bad. In the case of Neighbors he's not good at all. He plays that goofy character that he has played many times before where he has stupid jokes that's supposed to be made funny by his intense yet odd sense of humor. Maybe if there had only been the one story being told and actually told then he could have been funny and I might have liked this movie. The only gem in the acting is that the relationship between Mac and Kelly is so in sync with each other. This is a couple that is made to be liked because they like the same things and they love each other so much. However, the other two actors, Zac Efron and Dave Franco, they are underused. Their acting is decent but they are not used on their own. There's only a few times that they are on their own and the rest of the time it's with Seth Rogan and Rose Byrne being there with them.
 

Lee Roberts
Review by Lee Roberts
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