Rating: R | Runtime: 91 minutes
Release Date: August 25th, 2023 (USA)
Studio: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM)
Director(s): Emma Seligman
Writer(s): Emma Seligman & Rachel Sennott

Yeah, Hazel, let’s do terrorism.

When the premise hinges on two lesbians, disliked by their entire high school (not for being lesbians, but for being “untalented and ugly lesbians”), who decide to start a girls fight club as a means of hooking up with the hot cheerleaders they’ve crushed on (but never spoken to) for years, you should probably assume things will get unhinged. Even so, I never imagined Emma Seligman’s Bottoms would be this insane. She and co-writer Rachel Sennott have taken every over-the-top R-rated coed comedy trope that men have been wielding for decades and pulled them so far out of the realm of reality that nothing is off-limits. Nothing.

It all starts with PJ (Sennott) dragging Josie (Ayo Edebiri) to their senior year pre-first day fair. It’s supposed to be their moment to finally declare their love for Brittany (Kaia Gerber) and Isabel (Havana Rose Liu) respectively and yet they once more end up getting in their own awkward ways when a prime opportunity presents itself. Cue a hilarious fight between Isabel and her football captain boyfriend Jeff (Nicholas Galitzine) wherein he starts whining and pouting to the point of parody becoming too generous a descriptor and all hell breaks loose as Josie—who offers Isabel a “safe ride” home—inches her car slightly forward to tap his shin. The result is full-blown Boyz N the Hood melodrama.

Second-hand word of the incident and a white lie turned epic origin story courtesy of Hazel’s (Ruby Cruz) inability to understand sarcasm cause the plan to go in motion since being “bad girls” suddenly makes PJ and Josie appealing. The problem, of course, is that the other girls who join the “self-defense” club actually want to learn self-defense. With rape and domestic abuse running rampant (yet brushed off as a “cost of doing business” issue of life) and the rumored violence of a rival school coming to town for Homecoming, this idea could truly be empowering. If Josie and PJ had a single clue what they were doing.

You can probably guess where things go since Seligman follows the old 80s Revenge of the Nerds formula to the letter, but you’ll still be surprised by the ways she gets there. For one, she’s cast Marshawn Lynch as history teacher Mr. G. He pretty much posits an open-ended question devoid of context and tells them to figure it out while perusing pornography. He’s therefore the perfect choice to become the girls’ club advisor under the assumption he’ll never show up. Then there’s Hazel’s proclivity for bombs, Jeff pretty much acting like an eight-year-old made a wish on a Zoltar machine to become eighteen, and Miles Fowler’s Tim doing all he can to sabotage the girls so focus can return to the football team (it never left them in the first place).

It’s all pretty low-stakes stuff built to provide the actors ample room for chaotic hijinks that they embrace whenever the opportunity arises. Every emotional beat is dialed to eleven and every hyperbolic notion about future events proves literal in its implausibility. Because the only consequences on-screen that matter are those of the heart: cheating, lying, and jealousy. Assault, theft, and even murder are just crimes that can be processed later, time permitting. And Seligman and company lean into this absurdity by constantly calling it out. Was that last scene too wild to be true? Yeah, the characters think so (and verbalize it) too.

This means that you do need to get on its wavelength to enjoy it to the fullest. Bottoms will alienate as many people by its tone as it will its subject matter. But if you do, you’ll be rewarded with a very game cast (Sennott and Edebiri are the draw, but Cruz, Galitzine, and Summer Joy Campbell steal plenty of scenes too) and a sneakily smart script that injects meaningful satire into the usually toxically male conventions of yesteryear’s shallow romps. It probably skews too crazy for my own liking (I know a lot of people who loved this film), but I had a smile on my face throughout and laughed out loud enough to become a legitimate fan.

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Ayo Edebiri stars as Josie, Rachel Sennott as PJ, Zamani Wilder as Annie, Summer Joy Campbell as Sylvie, Havana Rose Liu as Isabel, Kaia Gerber as Brittany and Virginia Tucker as Stella Rebecca in BOTTOMS An Orion Pictures Release