Seth Rogen is a busy dude. This month, he has The Long Shot, which Joanna just saw at SXSW and loved. But he’s also in The Lion King, an episode of Jordan Peele’s reimagined Twilight Zone, and is going to play Walter Cronkite in a movie (there’s Rogen’s Oscar movie!). He’s also producing a movie called Good Boys, due out in late summer. The movie is about a group of kids, fronted by Jacob Tremblay, who are trying to learn how to kiss and end up in hijinks. Rogen is not in the movie but he has a higher profile than anyone else involved, so he appears at the top of the new red band trailer, pointing out the hypocrisy of letting kids act in R-rated movies but not see them.
This is the first hook Good Boys sinks. It’s a meta joke and has nothing to do with the movie itself, but it is such an effective way to introduce a movie about kids getting in trouble. And it plays into something the trailer sets up, which is that these kids, despite cussing, actually are innocent, and just trying to figure out how to kiss before a party leads them on an odyssey of adult depravity. Seth Rogen’s best humor comes from highlighting the inherent hypocrisy of social mores, and that bit at the beginning of the trailer is almost funnier than anything in the trailer itself.
But there are definitely some solid laughs. I lost it at the kids trying to cross a highway. Good Boys looks good, good enough I’m not sure they really needed to play the Rogen card in the advertising. I just hope this isn’t a case of all the good jokes being in the trailer. You can never tell with comedies. Blockers did not have a good trailer, it made the movie look sexist and reductive. But Blockers turned out to be one of the best comedies last year. I hope this is not a reverse Blockers, where the trailer is great but the movie sucks (early word out of SXSW is promising). Although all you really have to do to make a funny movie with kids is have them fall down a bunch. Kids falling down is always funny.
Here is the NSFW red band trailer for Good Boys:
