The movie Bottoms and Red, White, and Royal Blue (RWRB) came out around the same time and shared a main actor, Nicholas Galitzine. The character Galitzine portrayed in RWRB, Henry, is vastly different from Galitzine’s character Jeff in Bottoms, and many TikToks were made that laughed at this difference.
These TikToks made Bottoms out to be a light-hearted comedy, which it certainly tried hard to be, but, at the same time, the movie was not light-hearted at all. It talked about killing and involved killing much more than most non-horror movies usually do.
Overall, I was shocked at how wild and weird this movie was. The plot follows two high school girls, PJ (Rachel Sennott) and Josie (Ayo Edebiri), the outcasts at their school. In order to fit in and get into relationships with the cheerleaders, they decide to start a fight club. The fight club turns into a friend group, and we watch their relationships build up as the Homecoming football game approaches.
The plot itself would have been fine if there weren’t so many random, unnecessary lies involved and if the setting was more realistic. Everyone in the town, and at PJ and Josie’s school, is in love with the main football player Jeff. Jeff is a crybaby who treats everyone around him as inferior, and they all let him since he might be good at football (we never actually get to see him play). The setting is also not realistic because the principal signs off on the fight club, and a teacher watches the fight club go down without stopping it.
Everything from the setting to the plot to the characters was crazy trying to hide under funny. I won’t lie and say I didn’t laugh once during the hour-and-a-half movie, but most of the time, I was staring at the screen in confusion and shock. I was especially shocked by the last scene of the movie which I won’t spoil, but wow.
Bottoms tried to be a big feminist movie by making fun of feminism; the main girls tried to protect the girls in the fight club from guys but manipulated the girls the same way guys would do or did. The teacher advisor, Mr. G, played by Marshawn Lynch, hated on women in every other sentence because he was going through a divorce. Jeff and his on-and-off girlfriend Isabel (Havana Rose Liu) were supposed to show what a toxic relationship looks like and what to avoid, but it just showed a girl who did not care about herself and only wanted a boy to show her affection, not love. Nothing about this movie made me proud to be a woman or want to fight for women’s rights.
While I believe the point of Bottoms was to show a dramatic version of high school in order to point out the major issues high schoolers—especially female students—face, it just seemed like a group of old men who haven’t talked to a teenager since they were once teens themselves got in a room, and then, they talked about all of the weird things they think kids are up to now because of what they see on social media, and then someone made their conversation into a movie.
This movie was a wild ride that I did not want to be on and will never get on again.
