Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising

Nicholas Stoller’s sequel to Neighbors (2014), released in British cinemas as Bad Neighbours 2 on 6 May 2016, turns the fraternity next door into a sorority and asks whether the same jokes work with the sexes swapped. Mostly they do, and that is the trouble: the film is at its best when it is doing what the first one did, and least sure of itself when it is doing the thing it is proudest of. Mac and Kelly Radner (Seth Rogen and Rose Byrne) are thirty days from selling their house; Shelby (Chloë Grace Moretz) and her friends move in next door with a keg and a point to make. It is likeable, loose and often funny, and about a third of it is a lecture nobody finished writing.

Zac Efron is the reason to see it. Teddy Sanders has graduated, lost his best friend Pete (Dave Franco) to an engagement, and found that the world has no use for a man whose only qualification is his stomach. Efron plays him with a sweetness that is almost alarming, a big handsome boy who agrees with whatever was said last, and the one scene we have kept is a quiet one at the girls’ kitchen table, where Teddy explains, without self-pity, that he would like to be useful to somebody. We laughed at him for most of the running time and somewhere in the middle noticed the laugh had gone soft and sad. The script did not arrange that. Efron did.

The sorority is the problem. Shelby, Beth (Kiersey Clemons) and Nora (Beanie Feldstein) arrive with a case: in America a sorority may not throw its own parties, so the only parties on campus are the fraternities’, and anyone who has been to one knows why that is a bad deal. The film says this clearly and early, and then gives the three of them one personality between them. Moretz is game and loud; Feldstein gets the most from the least, a wide-eyed delivery that makes ordinary lines land; Clemons is barely written at all. They get the speeches. Rogen and Ike Barinholtz get the jokes. Byrne, who was the first film’s secret weapon, is again the best comic performer on screen, making Kelly’s panic funnier every time it comes round, and the film keeps cutting away from her to a man explaining something.

It looks like what it is. Brandon Trost lights the Radner house flat and bright, like a sitcom, and the parties in strobes and coloured smoke, and the two never feel like the same street. Theresa Guleserian turns the fraternity’s wreck of a house into a sorority’s with fairy lights and a mural, and the before-and-after is one of the few jokes told with pictures rather than words.

Several of the set pieces are the first film’s with the numbers changed. The airbags come back. The dean (Lisa Kudrow) comes back for a scene. Selena Gomez has about four lines as the president of the established sorority, Phi Lamda, and is gone. There is one scene in the middle, at a tailgate, in which Teddy, oiled to a shine and nearly undressed, holds a crowd’s attention for a purpose we will leave to the film, and we laughed hard and then felt a little cheap, because the film had spent the previous ten minutes telling us off for looking at people that way. We do not think it noticed the contradiction.

Stoller made Forgetting Sarah Marshall (2008), which understood that the funniest thing in a comedy is a person in pain who will not admit it, and the Teddy scenes are the only ones here that remember that. The first Neighbors had a clean idea, a couple who thought they were still young finding out they were not, and ran it for the whole length. This one has that idea, a second idea about women, and a running worry about whether the Radners are fit parents, and gets about halfway through each.

Worth an evening if you liked the first and are happy to hear the same jokes from the other side of the fence; not worth it for the sisterhood, which the title promises and the script has misplaced by the halfway mark. It runs 92 minutes and carries a 15.