Seth Rogen and Zack Efron make ideal foils for each other. Rogen with his living room physique and messy demeanor against the perfectly coiffed and toned and absurdly good-looking Efron is visual contrast enough. The two actors represent very different schools: Rogen of Apatow movies and Efron of Disney’s High School Musical and romantic comedies. In Neighbors, the new comedy from director Nicholas Stoller (he of Forgetting Sarah Marshall and The Five Year Engagement), they’re cast opposite each other as the embodiment of two starkly different yet not that distant stages of life. Rogen plays Mac, a young thirty-something with a wife Kelly (Rose Byrne) and an adorable baby daughter. Their time is spent almost exclusively on parenting and domestic responsibilities. The most they can get away with is making love right in front of the baby (which is what they’re doing at the start of the movie). That and trying to get out for a night to a club but having to pack an entire room full of baby stuff for the car ride—and then just lamely falling asleep by the front door.
The couple watches with curiosity as the house next to them is sold off. When the moving truck shows up though and a bunch of college kids jump out they instantly realize that their property value is likely to take a hit. So what to do other than try and ingratiate themselves to their new neighbors? They offer these frat boys weed and a polite request to keep the noise down. It works. At first, anyway. Efron plays Teddy, the president of the fraternity and he tells them all they have to do is call him, don’t call the police. He tempts them with an invite into their anarchic college clubhouse. He and Mac bond over shrooms and Batman. And then human nature sets in. The interests of a couple with a baby and those of a bunch of frat boys living side by side are simply incompatible.
Neighbors quickly-too quickly-becomes an uncomfortable rivals-try-to-destroy-each other revenge comedy. Mac and Kelly do everything they can to get these frat boys in trouble so that they’ll have no choice but to either move or get disciplined by their college so harshly that they’ll have no choice but to “keep it down”. The movie is too hasty. The period of neighborly good will between them is too brief. Scene transitions are quick and bizarre. It’s like the movie’s caving in and on itself. Some of the jokes really work (even if too many are of the one person says something wacky and the other asks “What are you doing?” variety). The fraternity’s bogus history (these guys actually believe that their club invented beer pong, among other things) is pretty hilarious as is a nearly surreal exchange between Mac and the frat when they’re all dressed up as and impersonating their favorite Robert DeNiro characters. But the storytelling is plainly half-assed.
It also begs the question: how plausible should a comedy be? If a gag is funny, should you even care how much it stretches belief? Neighbors has too many moments that just don’t add up at all. In one of the weirdest the frat boys get back at Mac and his friend by stealing the airbags out of his car and hiding them not just in his house, but also at his work—in his cubicle (it violently propels him into the ceiling). I didn’t buy for a second that they would track down where he works and where he sits like that. The schemes are too tidy. Conversely, characters figure out what is going on with improbable ease. Despite trying to tack on some points about how college glory doesn’t really matter once you’ve graduated, the movie goes to some surprisingly dark and strange places. Efron, who at first comes off like a charmer and people pleaser, gradually becomes a villain of real menace and danger. But while Rogen and Byrne (using her Australian accent instead of hiding it) have some funny exchanges (as does Hannibal Buress as a cop who is called out to the house a couple times), Efron is not a naturally comedic performer and the jokes don’t really emanate from him so much as work around him. Dave Franco as his right-hand man steals the scenes they share. Neighbors should have been slightly funnier, more sharply and coherently put together, and vastly more believable. As it is, its elements work about as well together as a frat house operating right next door to a family home.
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