High school farce 'Bottoms' rides on top | review

Bottoms follows two deeply uncool high school girls that create a self-defense club with the hope of wooing their cheerleader crushes

Emma Seligman’s vision of high school in Bottoms is equal parts satiric and surreal. Like if Luis Buñel directed The Breakfast Club or Andrei Tarkovsky directed Clueless. The pure absurdity of Bottoms is something to marvel at. Like the movie’s tagline suggests — “a movie about empowering women (the hot ones)” — it’s completely aware of the near-parody that it is. And thanks to Ayo Edebiri and Rachel Sennott’s performances that cement them even further as our brightest rising stars, Bottoms rides on top for most of its runtime.

Bottoms is in select theaters now.

If you liked Bottoms, I recommend: Bodies Bodies Bodies

To explain Bottoms, I need to spoil it just a tiny bit. The final shot of the movie, a baroque painting if I’ve ever seen one, pulls from a classic 90s / early aughts high school comedy trope. The school football team triumphantly raises the school’s quarterback. Students rush the field dancing with joy. Our best friend protagonists make up and hold each other.

However, a few added details make this unlike any high school comedy we’ve seen. The field is littered with incapacitated (and possibly dead) players and our ragtag group of protagonists are covered in blood (both their own and others’). In the background, a tree burns after recently being blown up with a homemade device. Welcome to the wonderfully weird and wacky world of writer/director Emma Seligman‘s Bottoms.

Seligman’s vision of high school in Bottoms is equal parts satiric and surreal. Like if Luis Buñel directed The Breakfast Club or Andrei Tarkovsky directed Clueless. It’s a tricky tone that Rachel Sennott and Ayo Edebiri nail with perfectly pitched performances as woefully lame high schoolers PJ and Josie. All they need is a mission. And like any good high school raunchy comedy, this mission involves getting laid: “Do you want to be the only girl virgin at Sarah Lawrence?” Best friends that stick together get laid together. At least that’s their prerogative.

There’s two hang ups to this plan. First, the school doesn’t like them. As they say, “they don’t hate us because we’re gay, they hate us because we’re the ugly, untalented gays.” Second, the objects of both of their affections, Josie’s crush Isabel (Havana Rose Liu) and PJ’s crush Britt (Kaia Gerber, most recently seen in Babylon), are the school’s it-girl cheerleaders who quite literally float in and out of scenes in slow motion.

If things weren’t complicated enough, Isabel’s boyfriend is the school’s star quarterback Jeff (a scene-stealing Nicholas Galitzine following his breakout performance in Red, White & Royal Blue — talk about range) who is treated like a god amongst men and who his teammates, specifically Tim (Miles Fowler), will do anything for. In the cafeteria, the team is literally seated like they’re in The Last Supper except Jeff is Jesus and the rest of the team are his disciples.

Which is why when PJ and Josie mistakenly “run over” Jeff with their car, the school turns even more against them. “Damn I got ‘F—-t #2’ this time,” PJ remarks at the graffiti scrawled on their lockers. Their plan to clear their names (and maybe get some one-on-one time with their crushes) is to start a self defense club where girls at the school can learn to protect themselves and like talk… and stuff. The plan is a little unclear. Despite what its trailer suggests, Bottoms is more of a hangout movie than it is driven by an actual plot. A cheating scandal, murder plot and “yeah Hazel, let’s do terrorism” later and we find ourselves in the final act not completely sure how we got there.

Bottoms is laugh a minute from hilarious one-liners delivered with charmingly awkward precision (“I was gonna study for Mr. G’s ‘Women Murdered in History’ test”) to visual gags (a spring breakers-inspired crime montage set to “Total Eclipse of the Heart”). However, that is just as much a detriment to the movie as it is an asset. While the delightfully off-kilter tone and surrealist touches make for an entertaining romp, the movie sacrifices plot momentum and character development in its wake putting more in line with a high school movie parody a la Not Another Teen Movie. That would be fine if Seligman’s screenplay stayed committed to the movie’s farcical nature. It gets a little too close to being profound in a way that took me out of the carefully built world. Thankfully it sticks the landing (on a pineapple juice-soaked football field).

The pure absurdity of Bottoms is something to marvel at. Like the movie’s tagline suggests — “a movie about empowering women (the hot ones)” — it’s completely aware of the near-parody that it is. And thanks to Sennott and Edebiri’s performances that cement them even further as our brightest rising stars, Bottoms rides on top for most of its runtime.

Instead of a full story, I look at the movie as a series of vignettes of high school awkwardness and cranked-up satirical world-building — aided by a stellar supporting cast with standouts Marshawn Lynch as a problematic history teacher (“Feminism… what is it?” scrawled on the board), Ruby Cruz as well-meaning classmate Hazel who doesn’t completely understand sarcasm, and Galitzine’s Jeff whose cartoonish portrayal of a high school quarterback steals ever scene he’s in with even the slightest facial expression. The 2000s parody film may be dead (Scary Movie, you will always be famous) but Bottoms is born from it — a devilishly weird and demented baby.

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Hey! I’m Karl. You can find me on Twitter here. I’m also a Tomatometer-approved critic.

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Karl Delossantos

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Hey, I'm Karl, founder and film critic at Smash Cut. I started Smash Cut in 2014 to share my love of movies and give a perspective I haven't yet seen represented. I'm also an editor at The New York Times, a Rotten Tomatoes-approved critic, and a member of the Online Film Critics Society.