“Bottoms” is your “typical” teen/high school (sex) comedy in which the losers try to weasel themselves out of their low social standing at school by lying their way to end up with the hot girls, except this time its lesbians. PJ (Rachel Sennott) and Josie (Ayo Edebiri) are considered losers in this world (we have to suspend our disbelief here) and come up with a plan to start a “fight club” or self defense class in order to meet girls and lose their virginity before college; based on a lie that they had spent their summer in juvie and could defend themselves as well as teach other girls to defend themselves. The movie is funny, bloody, disastrous and may be cringeworthy at times, but isn’t that just what high school is? The plot of the movie is a little patchy, which might be why a lot of movie makers are ditching the 1hour 30 minutes format for the 2 hours to provide a more fleshed out story.

“Bottoms”, which is a play on the lead characters’ social rankings, are very self-aware and don’t lean too much into “political correctness”, which movies like these might be tempted to in order to appease their core-audience. The movie avoids being preachy, or like how some writers lean too much into “twitter dialogue” that it makes the characters unbearable. Rather, it leans into being a comedy about quirky teenagers who punch each other into a bloody mess and deliver on that. On a large scale, “Bottoms” isn’t really telling a typical lesbian story because most women don’t come up with flagrant lies in order to try to lure girls into making out with them. One of the presses states that it is about female “incels” (in the linguistic sense of the word, not necessarily how it’s been coopted by the loser men) which raised a lot of anger because of how completely differently women are socialized as opposed to men. The “female incel/femcel” clearly behaves differently from their male counterpart and may actually be endearing, although PJ (Rachel Sennott) kind of sucks in almost the same way a man would suck.

The movie leans a little too much into absurdity and doesn’t give us full-fledged characters to anyone, not even particularly the leads, and this makes the audience quite detached from the characters. There aren’t really any stakes in the movie. Everything plays out in quite a ridiculous manner, which robs the movie of any real tension. I think the tension does add to the fun in such comedic movies and provides a satisfactory resolution. For example, even when you know that the lies are going to catch up with the girls, it isn’t quite satisfying how the story develops or even how they get exposed; I was mostly concerned about Hazel (Ruby Cruz), who had just gotten a beating of a lifetime in front of the whole school.

The introduction of the rival school team, whose threats we had only heard of, as opposed to the school’s jocks, like Jeff (Nicholas Galitzine) and Tim (Miles Fowler), who were an actual active threat and actively antagonized the girls didn’t quite make sense to me. Jeff and Tim should have been the antagonists all together and the girls should have fought the boys in that final scene. There was no redemption arch for the jocks that warranted them avoiding the wrath of the fight club.

The cast is very talented and there is great on-screen chemistry. However, they weren’t given much to go with. Brittany (Kaia Gerber) and Isabel (Havana Rose Liu) are barely given enough time to shine. However, they gave good performances and takes me back to the heydays of chick-flicks, which need to make a comeback. Hollywood needs to continue investing in teen comedies, chick flicks, more so queer content because it not only is easy money, but movies like these usually end up with a cult following and are ingrained in pop culture. Moreover, the more fun, low budget movies are made, the easier it is to build worlds around such movies, create tropes that actually end up undercutting the need for 3-hour movies, because the canon and lore of the characters is already established in pop culture. Bottoms doesn’t really break any new ground; however, it is a good comedy with not only strong female leads, but lesbian representation that goes beyond merely being sexy or sexual but provides a gritty and camp story that focuses on women’s stories, because women’s stories matter. We hope to see more of this. I hope Hollywood listens.

Rating- 3 out of 5

Streaming on- Amazon Prime