Josie and P.J. are losers.
It’s not because they’re lesbians (though that doesn’t help). It’s not because they’re “ugly and talentless” (though they’ll admit to that, too). No, it’s because here they are—in their senior year of Rockridge Falls High School—and they still haven’t had sex.
The horror.
P.J.—the go-getter of the two—still has schemes in place. She still hopes to lose her virginity before gaining her diploma. Sure, she’d love to hop in the sack with cheerleader Brittany, but let’s be honest: She’s not picky. Any girl—or, at least, any girl who’d rate above a six on P.J.’s cuteness scale—might do. But time is running short.
Josie’s situation is more complex. She has a strong crush on Isabel, another cheerleader. But Isabel, it seems, is straight. Not just a little straight, mind you, but dating-the-star-football-player sort of straight. Chances of success seem … low.
Then comes the night of the back-to-school carnival.
P.J. and Josie converse awkwardly with Isabel and Brittany. Isabel accuses boyfriend and star football player, Jeff, of cheating on her. Despite Jeff’s protestations, Isabel is mightily upset, and P.J. and Josie offer her a ride. Jeff berates the teens from outside the vehicle and demands—loudly—that Isabel get out of it. Josie starts the car, drives forward and nearly touches the car’s bumper to Jeff’s precious, precious knee.
Well, the gust of wind from the near collision must’ve been surprisingly powerful. Jeff collapses in pain. The entire football team rushes to Jeff’s rescue as the girls back out and drive away. The next day, Jeff’s on crutches (quickly abandoned when football practice starts). P.J. and Josie are in the principal’s office, trying to explain what on Earth would’ve possessed them to assault the school’s most beloved athlete/student/human and threaten the school’s chances of winning an astronomically important football game.
The girls tell the principal that they were actually just practicing. Gearing up (so to speak) for their, um, self-defense course. Yeah, that’s it—their self-defense course that they’re leading for other young women at Rockridge Falls High. Because of empowerment and stuff.
It’s a lie, of course. But P.J. sees the possibilities. If they lead a fight club—er, self-defense course—for the high school’s female students, that would put them in close, sweaty proximity to the same female students.
And who knows what might come of it? Nothing says “I think you’re cute” more than hitting a girl in the face.
When a movie is predicated on students starting a fight club in order to have sex with their same-gender classmates, you’re not starting with a lot to work with in this category. Still, we do have some positives to mention.
First, P.J. and Josie are good friends, and have been since they were 6. (And for those who are curious, that’s all they are; good friends.) And while their friendship goes through some rough patches here, the women come out still platonically committed to one another.
And then there’s the fight club itself. They brand it as a conduit for empowerment and—much to P.J. and Josie’s own surprise—it becomes that and more. The girls who join the club become friends. They support one another. And ultimately, they become the school’s brave defenders during a (surprisingly brutal) football game.
And while all of these positive elements come with a boatload—no, a Caribbean cruise ship-load—of issues, those core values of friendship, support and protecting the more vulnerable can still be found here.
For all of Bottoms’ problems, there’s an odd (if superficial) thread of spirituality throughout.
For instance, Josie’s main room décor appears to be a mosaic of a Black Jesus. (When a guest visits Josie’s room, she sees the picture and awkwardly tells Josie, “I love God” by way of approval.) One of the fight club’s members is described as being “super Christian,” (and it’s not meant as an insult). In one scene, P.J. wears about 20 crosses around her neck. We see Jesus referenced on a school chalkboard. When Isabel suspects Jeff of cheating on her, she takes issue with the much-older woman’s faith. She describes the woman as being “Catholic, not even regular Christian!”
Jeff (whose football jersey reads on the back, simply, “Jeff”) is jokingly treated as a messiah-like figure by the school. For instance, a cafeteria mural features a remaking of Michelangelo’s famous God-touching-the-hand-of-Adam painting from the Sistine Chapel, featuring Jeff as Adam.
Josie speculates what her future might hold. She imagines herself not having sex in high school, and then convincing herself that she’s not a lesbian, then marrying a church pastor that everyone knows is “fruity,” then learning that her pastor husband is “having sex with the evangelist” but trying to make the marriage work anyway for the sake of the kids. She ends this recitation by begging P.J. to come and visit her and her husband during this dark time.
Given that the whole movie is predicated on sex and violence, the next two sections could get out of hand. Don’t think I can detail every problematic episode here (or in the section below), but I’ll try to give you an idea of what to expect.
There’s no explicit nudity, outside the painted mural depicting Jeff as Michelangelo’s Adam. We see the subject fully nude, including his genitalia (just as in the original painting).
Jeff is depicted in nothing but a jockstrap with some regularity—including on school posters. (We always see him from the front, never the rear.) He engages in some pelvic thrust-type dances (as do members of the cheerleading squad and unlikely football fans), and we see him come out of an older woman’s bedroom wearing just that jockstrap. (We see the woman, too, wearing a lacy but modest negligee. In the moments proceeding their appearance, we hear a great deal of off-screen moaning.) While Jeff’s relationship with the much older woman is apparently “legal,” Josie still says it’s just wrong. (This isn’t the first time that Jeff has cheated on Isabel, apparently.)
Several high-school girls engage in same-sex make-out sessions. One appears to be sexual foreplay, with one participant removing the shirt of another. (We see the bra beneath, but nothing more.) A male teacher readers pornographic magazine called Divorced and Happy during class. (The front of the magazine depicts a woman’s backside clad only in thong-like underwear.)
P.J. and Josie dedicate one afternoon self-defense session to talking, sharing their experiences with sexual assault. When participants are asked if anyone has been raped, no one raises their hand. When gray areas are added in, everyone does. One says that she’s been “assaulted, like, a million times,” but she adds what really bothers her is that everyone obsesses about her looks and ignores the fact that she’s really, really smart. Another female student talks about her experiences being stalked. Still another discusses her stepfather: We’re led to believe that the stepfather has sexually assaulted her, but eventually it seems that she’s just really upset that he insists on holding a “Friday movie night” every week.
Two apparently straight girls discover lesbian inclinations. Another says that she’s straight, but that she enjoys gay porn. As a fundraiser, students sell used underwear to older men, and one poses in a bikini for photos. We hear a ton of references—often using crude words—to both sexual acts and male and female genitals. We see guys without shirts and women in various tight, revealing getups. Someone makes a crude reference to menstruation.
The fight club is, indeed, just that: These high school teens punch and kick and otherwise brutalize each other, leading to plenty of bloody facial wounds and black eyes.
Because this plot point often involves women hitting women, there’s an especially intense wince-factor in the violence we see (even if much of it is played for laughs.)
That wince-factor is magnified when men beat up women. In an effort to undermine the club, a member of the football team somehow gets one of its members to fight a truly unhinged, heavily muscled guy. The “demonstration” grows particularly brutal, and one combatant is left horrifically bloodied on the gym floor—before someone kicks the person’s face in another spatter of blood. We later see the victim, eyes swollen and covered in bruises, lying on a couch.
To prove that they are qualified to lead a self-defense/fight club, P.J. and Josie both lie and say they were in juvenile detention, and they make up some wildly violent stories about what went on in there. Guards, they say, would sometimes give them all sorts of weapons and make them fight—sometimes to the death. We hear about knife fights and rat poisonings. As part of one speech, Josie lets slip she killed someone, but then adds that the woman in question was revived after two minutes. (Josie reinforces that her “victim” recovered, while P.J. emphasizes the death part.)
A teacher expresses exasperation that a student stopped attending after the first day. When the teacher is told that this student stopped attending because he committed suicide, the teacher expresses skepticism that the suicide ever happened.
One member of the fight club expresses a very strong desire to kill her stepfather. People fall, as if hurt or dead, in football practice with some regularity. Jeff smashes a chemistry flask in a gesture of anger.
A male student is hit with a fruit cup. He exclaims that that was the last straw and immediately scrawls on a notebook, “Plan to blow up school.” A car is blown up, as is a tree. We learn that Rockridge Falls’ rival school, which they play only once every 20 years or so, makes it a point to kill someone on Rockridge Falls’ team. We hear various comically horrific tales of just how those students have met their ends in the past.
[Spoiler Warning] This year, the opposing team targeted Jeff for its lethal intent. When the fight club learns about the plot, its members rush the field to take on the football team. Jeff is carried to safety by Josie, while the other teens beat up the athletes from the rival school. One gets stabbed through the chest with a sword, oddly. When the melee is over, several football players are strewn across the football field of battle, and P.J. notes that most of them are dead. “We’ll process that later,” she says.
More than 90 f-words, along with 30 s-words and two uses of the c-word. We also hear (as you might expect) a bevy of other profanities, including “a–,” “b–ch,” “d–n,” “h—” and “p-ssed.” God’s name is misused nearly 15 times (twice with the word “d—n”), and Jesus’ name is abused once. The word “f-ggot” is scrawled on both P.J.’s and Josie’s lockers.
A minor character smokes either a big cigar or a massive marijuana blunt.
We hear references to vomiting. Several people lie throughout the film: Josie and P.J., for instance, lie about their experience in juvie, while Jeff lies to his girlfriend about not having an affair. A house is egged and toilet-papered. A teacher becomes convinced that women are evil (and teaches it in class for a time). P.J. tells a student that even though she’s a “Black Republican, you’re the smartest of all of us.” (The Black Republican agrees.)
It’s not often that Plugged In and Rolling Stone magazine would agree on something. But when Rolling Stone called Bottoms the “horniest, bloodiest high school movie of the 21st century,” we’d have to agree.
The thing is, Rolling Stone meant it as a compliment.
Certainly, the distributors of Bottoms took it as a compliment, given that they use the line prominently in their very own advertising. Certainly, Plugged In’s own tsk-tsk distain of Bottoms, what with all its blood and sex and swearing and LGBT elements, would likely be seen as another feather in its cap. Many will, after all, likely go to this movie specifically because it’s as unfettered as it is unhinged, as lewd as it is ludicrous.
But I do want to focus on two words in the Rolling Stone quote. “high school.”
Yes, Bottoms is about high school. The critical consensus on Rotten Tomatoes (where it holds a 98% “Freshness” rating as of this writing) is that it’s an “instant high school comedy classic.”
Oh, yeah, it’s also rated R. Which means that the majority of high schoolers can’t, or at least shouldn’t, see this “comedy classic.”
Is it irresponsible for a high school teacher to sponsor a female, no-holds-barred fight club on school property? Yeah, that’s all part of the comedy, right?
Is it irresponsible for moviemakers to craft a hard-R movie, and then explicitly market said movie to those too young to responsibly watch it? No one’s laughing about that.
For those who believe in keeping kids safe from extreme onscreen content, it’s just not funny. And for the culture at large, it’s just a given—not even, apparently, worth a discussion.
Paul Asay has been part of the Plugged In staff since 2007, watching and reviewing roughly 15 quintillion movies and television shows. He’s written for a number of other publications, too, including Time, The Washington Post and Christianity Today. The author of several books, Paul loves to find spirituality in unexpected places, including popular entertainment, and he loves all things superhero. His vices include James Bond films, Mountain Dew and terrible B-grade movies. He’s married, has two children and a neurotic dog, runs marathons on occasion and hopes to someday own his own tuxedo. Feel free to follow him on Twitter @AsayPaul.
