Good Boys

Gene Stupnitsky’s directorial debut, Good Boys follows three middle schoolers (Jacob Tremblay’s Max, Keith L. Williams’ Lucas, and Brady Noon’s Thor) as they get into a host of misadventures on the way to a so-called “kissing party.” It’s a decidedly familiar premise that’s employed to progressively tedious effect by Stupnitsky, as the filmmaker, working from a script written with Lee Eisenberg, delivers a narrative rife with desperately unfunny bits of comedy and a whole host of unconvincing protagonists – with, in terms of the latter, the trio of heroes generally coming off as one-dimensional caricatures that bear little resemblance to actual, human people. (It doesn’t help, certainly, that all three kids deliver disastrously grating and unreasonably over-the-top work here.) The somewhat one-note nature of Stupnitsky and Eisenberg’s screenplay ensures that Good Boys suffers from as erratic an atmosphere as one could possibly envision, and although the picture admittedly does contain a small handful of compelling sequences (eg the friends attempt to cross a busy highway), there simply reaches a point wherein it becomes virtually impossible to wholeheartedly (or even partially) care about any of this (which, in turn, paves the way for a near endless third act) – with the end result is a mostly ineffectual comedy whose central conceit (ie children cursing and talking about sex) grows tiresome virtually from the get-go (ie the novelty wears off almost immediately).

** out of ****