“Bottoms” follows two unpopular girls in their senior year who start a fight club to try to impress and hook up with cheerleaders.
PJ (Rachel Sennot) and Josie (Ayo Edebiri) are unpopular gay girls at their school. They are entering their senior year and want to get laid. When a rumor says that both girls spent their summer in juvie, they begin a women’s fight club in their school to get their crush’s attention.
Jokes are flying around a mile a minute in this film, and that didn’t work for me. You can’t digest one of the jokes before two more are uttered. “Bottoms” is funny, don’t get me wrong, but I didn’t laugh nearly as much as the rest of the audience did at the SXSW premiere. The humor is ridiculous and tends to escalate quickly. The sense of humor here is definitely not for everyone, either.
The premise of this film is excellent on paper, but I wasn’t as entertained as I wished I had been. I felt that there was way too much ad-libbing for the film. There are times when you can strike gold with ad-libbing, but other times when it does not translate well on-screen, making the scene feel underwritten.
I appreciate that director Emma Seligman tried something new with “Bottoms.” I loved her first feature, “Shiva Baby,” which also starred Sennot, but that film has a vastly different tone. Absurdist comedy is hard to do, and while I may not have been as amused as I wanted to be, it seemed like the rest of the audience was.
Sennot and Edebiri were great as the two leads. They riffed off each other well, and their characters had distinct personalities. PJ is more biting in how she talks and a bit mean-spirited, while Josie mostly feels out of her depth but has more of a dry sense of humor. I also enjoyed the character of Hazel (Ruby Cruz), the organizer of this group.
My biggest gripe with the film is the lack of character depth. This girls’ fight club is full of different types of women, but we never really get to know them. We know that PJ and Josie like the two popular girls at school, Brittany (Kaia Gerber) and Isabel (Havan Rose Liu), but they are never given any deeper characteristics than the typical superficial hot popular girl. The other female outcasts who joined this fight club feel empowered by it, but we don’t get a good sense of who they are.
“Bottoms” will be a sure-fire cult classic one day. The performances were funny, and I liked this ensemble, I just wish I had learned more about their characters. There are a lot of jokes, and while not all of them landed for me, you can’t help but giggle at a few of them for just how silly they are.
“Bottoms” recently had its World Premiere at the 2023 SXSW Film Festival
