Good Boys is a 2019 newly released film produced by Seth Rogen. This movie is a coming-of-age adventure about three young best friends, Max (Jacob Tremblay) Lucas (Keith L. Williams) and Thor (Brady Noon) just entering middle school and learning to navigate through “love”, friendship, and the social hierarchy. As the audience is following the story of these three adolescents, self-proclaimed “bean bag boys”, we see how their immature sense of humor and child-like viewpoint lend to their aid and their downfall in their mission to go to the school’s resident cool kid’s “kissing party”.  

I saw the movie in theaters, and honestly, I really enjoyed it. It was a modernized view of the struggle of middle school. Including fitting in with the popular crowd, growing apart from friends and attempting to find yourself. The fact that it’s rated R doesn’t detract from its naïve charm, but it may have too many innuendos for the faint of heart.   

Many of the raunchy jokes landed and made the entire theatre crack up. In one scene, Lucas is going to sell a playing card so the “bean bag boys” can gets some money, but he can’t bring himself to part with it, so instead he sells his parents “CPR doll” (actually a sex doll) to the man without understanding what it actually is he sold.  It appealed to the dorky, and slightly inappropriate, preteen that we all were at one point in our lives which helped make it genuinely funny.  

The R-rating is understandable because of most of the content, including sexual innuendos and paraphernalia, drug references, and cursing , but it is sort of odd that the age demographic that the film is depicting and the children who star in it can’t even watch the movie. The target audience is adults, aged 17-30, who remember the awkwardness of middle school and puberty and have a more immature sense of humor. We see Max, Lucas and Thor steal molly (MDMA) from two women because they “don’t want them to throw their lives away for sex drugs”.  

This R-rated content is something that, for better or worse, most young people are accustomed to. Almost everyone made inappropriate jokes about sex and drugs when we didn’t actually understand, but that’s just a part of being young and stupid. It just seems ill-advised to attempt to prevent young people from consuming content that’s specifically about them.  

It is vaguely reminiscent of Bo Burnham’s Eighth Grade, which was a coming-of-age comedy with the same adult R-rating. This is because of the fact that they are both stories of young people that said young people are unable to watch because of cursing and sexual jokes.  

These “young teen venturing into adulthood” stories seem to all get the same bad rap because of their maturity levels which is odd because the plot is based off things young people actually go through, even if it is exaggerated and hyperbolic.  

Good Boys landed a solid 79% on Rotten Tomatoes, and that’s fair. The vulgar humor mixed with the doe-eyed naïve main characters makes for a surprisingly lighthearted and fun watch. This film seems like more of a PG-13 rating to me, but every person and parent and viewpoint is different. I would understand if a parent believed that this film was too mature for their preteen to watch, but it’s a bit over the top that young teenagers don’t even have the option to view it. 

This film is a sweet story and a good laugh. I would rate it a 7 out of 10. I’d recommend anyone with an immature side in the humor department to give it a watch, as long as you’re over the legal viewing age.