Movie Review: 'Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising'
By Bill Wine
KYW Newsradio 1060
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) -- Last time out, the chaos involved fraternity brothers.
This time it's sorority sisters who are the nuisance neighbors.
But this second helping of comedy is not even up to the standards of the first.
Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising is the sequel to 2014's Neighbors, an escalating-revenge comedy about the thirtysomething married parents of a newborn, Mac and Kelly Radner, played by Seth Rogen and Rose Byrne, who find themselves desperate for sleep but living next door to a rowdy college fraternity led by president and party boy Teddy Sanders, played by Zac Efron.
In the follow-up, set a few years later with the Radners expecting their second child and trying to sell their house, a hard-partying sorority takes over the off-campus house next door because only fraternities and not sororities can throw parties on the nearby campus.
This will not exactly help the Radners either get any sleep or attract any buyers.
Which is why Mac and Kelly turn to their former enemy, Sanders, who has served as the sorority's advisor, for help. And he has just enough resentment of the way he was treated by the Kappa Nu sisters to throw in with the Radners.
Nicholas Stoller (Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Get Him to the Greek, The Five-Year Engagement), who directed the first outing, returns to the director's chair, and Rogen, Byrne, and Efron are back as well, with Rogen returning as one of the producers and serving as co-writer, along with Stoller, Evan Goldberg, Andrew J. Cohen, and Brendan O'Brien.
They're joined by Chloe Grace Moretz as the feisty leader of the rogue sorority that's keeping the Radners up at night and providing a scary glimpse into their toddler daughter's possible future. Yep, the sorority is even more intrusive than the frat was.
The essential problem with the first oneupmanship romp was that the movie itself was much like the late-night parties being depicted – out of control and a lot less fun that it sounded like.
The sequel is in much the same boat, lacking inspiration with another paper-thin plot, a dependence on a gaggle of lazy gross-out gags and sudden slapstick stunts, few if any believable characters, and more parties and pranks than a discriminating audience is interested in.
Early on, the script at least flirts with social commentary, acknowledging such themes as tolerance, sexism, and female empowerment. But only in passing and not at all thoughtfully.
By film's end, the committee of screenwriters has either lost interest or given up on their cockamamie narrative to such an extent that they finish up with a series of allegedly conclusive scenes that are so arbitrary and unconvincing, they seem to have wandered in from another movie.
So we'll move next door to 1-1/2 stars out of 4 for the incoherent sequel, Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising, which is marketed in the U.K. as Bad Neighbors 2. Well, bad is the operative word here. As franchises go, this one has already spewed out one film too many.
