Review Roundup: What Did Critics Think of GOOD BOYS?

Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg have released their newest comedy, Good Boys. In the R-rated comedy, three sixth grade boys ditch school and embark on an epic journey while carrying accidentally stolen drugs, being hunted by teenage girls, and trying to make their way home in time for a long-awaited party.

Find out what critics thought of the comedy below!

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Leah Greenblatt, Entertainment Weekly:

Mostly, the story is just scant scaffolding on which to hang cheerfully crass jokes about Stranger Things, anal beads, and cocaine. But it's a winning showcase, too, for the loopy charm of its young stars: Room's Tremblay as Max, the ideal Everyboy; Noon as the spiky but vulnerable Thor, a sort of fun-size Danny McBride; and Williams' rule-abiding Lucas, a kid so earnestly transparent, it's like he ate truth serum for breakfast. In the end, it's their fundamental goodness - not all the wicked, winky "bad" - that's easily the best thing about Boys.

Dennis Harvey, Variety:

"Good Boys" is fast-paced and energetic, but its bad-taste humor seldom rises above the pedestrian. Even when the gags aren't strictly scatological, as in a dangerous dash across a busy highway stretch (hey, gotta get to the mall one way or another) or a paintball skirmish at a frat house, they're still not very clever. This is the kind of movie where kids fool around with their parents' sex toys, having no idea what they're for, and we're meant to find it hilarious - over and over. Some will no doubt find this material inherently offensive, when the bigger trouble is that it just isn't very good.

Christy Lemire, Roger Ebert:

But "Good Boys" aims to be about more than just graphic dialogue and gross-out humor. It also depicts the bittersweet moment when you realize you're growing apart from the childhood playmates with whom you'd promised to be friends for life. Max, Thor and Lucas refer to themselves with great solemnity as the Beanbag Boys, and they try to fight off the nagging sensation that perhaps their interests are changing and they don't have as much in common as they once did. It's the same kind of emotionally truthful premise that drove the misfits-on-a-rampage high school comedy "Superbad," which "Good Boys" resembles in myriad ways, including the presence of Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg as producers. There's an honest heart beneath the racy laughs. If only sixth-graders themselves could actually see it.

Richard Roeper, Chicago Sun Times:

Tremblay, Noon and Williams are terrific together as three loyal and true friends who are at that stage in life where they still have each other's backs but are beginning to realize that despite their vows to remain THIS CLOSE for life, life might have other plans for them. For all its wacky, gross-out, shock-ya humor, "Good Boys" has a lot of heart.

Eric Vespe, Collider:

All that is true, but something curious happens when it's a trio of tweens at the forefront of this madness versus the teenagers you're used to seeing in a movie like this. There's an innocence to the gross-out jokes that simply isn't there when the same stuff happens with a horny teenage boy.

In short, if a heartfelt movie about friendship that just also happens to involve a whole lot of cussing kids sounds good to you, then I can say this movie delivers what you want.

Ben Travis, Empire:

If the combination of gross-out gags, sweet meditations on friendship, and odyssey of increasingly extreme hijinks sounds familiar, Good Boysundeniably plays out at times like Superbad: The Early Years - particularly the dynamic between the loud, brash Thor and skinny, gawky Max, closely modelled on Jonah Hill and Michael Cera's 2007 double act. Good Boys at least twists that formula by shifting the age group down a few years - and some of its best moments come in focusing on a leading trio so young they haggle over bedtimes, are in awe of rival playground gang the 'Scooter Squad', and, in the film's best running gag, are repeatedly flummoxed by child-proof packaging.

Sarah Stewart, New York Post

Underneath it all is a core of genuine sweetness that keeps "Good Boys" from being a pointless shock-fest. The filmmakers have their finger on the pulse of the exquisite awkwardness of the tween years.

Whether or not that demographic should be allowed anywhere near this film, it's a heartening vote of confidence that today's kids, despite the onslaught of R-rated life material, are all right.

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