‘Neighbors 2’ is a little bit funny

Over the course of its hour and a half running time, it inspires maybe three loud guffaws, a few modest chortles, a sub-sonic chuckle and a handful of silent smiles.

On the one hand, the set-up is so obvious, so designed to re-create the dynamics of the original movie, that it seems either a purely cynical exercise or so blatant a cynical exercise that it qualifies as a bold comic gesture:

[...] it’s one of the best laughs in the movie, as well as a cautionary example.

Yet for all the movie’s boldness, its coarseness, its in-your-faceness, “Neighbors 2” is constrained by political correctness.

The sorority is at least as bad as the fraternity ever was, but, because the couple is fighting girls, the movie has less fun with it.

The screenplay ties itself into a knot from the start, when it presents the founding of the nasty sorority as a feminist event.

She is further disillusioned when she attends a frat party and finds the experience sexist and degrading.

[...] she joins forces with three new friends to establish a new sorority, independent of the Greek system.

In the new sorority, they throw parties that are just as loud and lewd and awful as the frat parties, though the movie expects us to recognize a difference that isn’t there.

In any case, the parties are a source of misery to next-door neighbors Mac (Seth Rogen) and Kelly (Byrne), who don’t realize that’s what keeping them up at night isn’t mere raucousness, selfishness and noise, but burgeoning feminist assertion.

By treating the sorority sisters of “Neighbors 2” with kid gloves, they rob them of humor and, inadvertently, make them more culpable (and therefore more dislikable) with every awful thing they do.