Review of Good Neighbours

Many spoilers inside.

This review will concentrate mostly on what bothered me. There is no need for character summaries and an introduction to the movie. You can find that in the many reviews that have been written already.

Although this movie is supposed to be a black comedy of sorts, the only thing that my guest and I laughed at was the incredibly atrocious acting. There are a few scenes where the landlady and a friend act as narrators. They talk to each other, as if reading from their scripts, so that we, the audience, can be updated. This was done in such an obvious and unnecessary way.

I will now list, in explicit detail, some things that bothered me. If you can overlook all of this, you can probably enjoy the movie.

• The three main characters are equally shallow, dry and uninteresting. We have the 20-something waitress, with no visible hobbies or interests outside of her cats and she speaks in short phrases as someone who is bored and annoyed. She only ever speaks for more than 10 seconds to the one person that we all dislike, her disabled neighbour. We then have the stumbling, talkative, annoying Victor. He is essentially the poor man's Woody Allen. The problem is, Baruchel, is so typecast as this type of character that we are tired of it. He also seems to be falling for the one girl that nobody really cares about. If she gave him any signals, we missed it. What he saw in her, we'll never know. As Spencer has been analyzed so much in other reviews, I won't do that here.

• But I will talk about the evil wheelchair. Evil because it brings about two plot holes and one sloppy detail that you have to smoke some strong chronic to overlook it. The climax is not that Spencer is not really in a wheelchair, even though it should be. Seeing him get up happens well over 40 minutes before the movie is over and it's in one of the trailers. He claims that he was in a car accident a year earlier that killed his wife. We see him getting a massage in one scene with only his buttocks covered. I've never been in a car accident, never mind one where someone in the car dies. But I imagine that there is no case where that kind of impact has left one person dead and another person completely unharmed with no damage at all. So Spencer is not only scar free after such a car crash, he is in amazing shape. He also decided to live on the first (or second, if you're British) floor with no wheelchair access. We have to overlook the fact that Spencer is okay with complete dependence on others and that he never goes outside. OK, I can buy that. I cannot buy an insurance company spending tens of thousands of dollars making his beautiful apartment handicap friendly in a non-wheelchair access building. I cannot buy that Spencer somehow managed to fake being in a wheelchair. Where are these insurance companies that don't ask for x-rays showing spinal chord damage or cellular damage proof? You can lie about needing a wheelchair… your body cannot. Then, as if these two major plot holes are not enough, we have to buy a ludicrous situation. Victor feels that Spencer wants to go outside even though he never asked for it. So he builds a ramp. And by "ramp," I mean some lumber drilled onto a staircase. What's that? There is no way the landlady would accept such a dangerous and sloppy violation of building code? Wrong, she said that it was okay. I guess everyone else is the building doesn't mind half the staircase being inaccessible to them. There is a very funny scene in an episode of a Big Bang Theory episode where Sheldon and Leonard try to move a massive heavy box for Penny three floors up. I think a very funny scene would be someone pushing Spencer up or helping him down. That person would have a one foot-gap between the two slats of wood for traction. I imagine the wood itself has no traction at all. The entire idea is simply horrible and will not work at all. Much like the scene itself. We already see Victor as the overly-helpful, awkward neighbour. We don't need to see him building an illegal, un-requested, dangerous ramp to prove something.

• And if it wasn't enough that a serial killer is so boring and predictable, he is also quite stupid. Armed with just a hoodie as disguise (much like Jack Bauer), he goes down a fire escape, raping and killing women in the middle of the night. He must assume that nobody he knows will ever see him walking, leaving or arriving. To add insult to injury, the final scenes revolve around the idea that Victor must be framed for all of his murders including a recent one that has police officers a little too close for comfort. Why Victor? He's the only other neighbour they know. He and his accomplice will plan a suicide where Victor claims that he was unhappy with life and some other last-minute details we don't yet know about. Imagine that conversation: Detective 1: Wow, we never even saw him as a suspect. I can't believe it was him. Detective 2: Yeah, you know how these serial killers are. They are friendly, socially connected people. One day, this guy gets depressed and decides to rape and kill a bunch of random strangers he has no connection to. I saw it coming.

I have much, much more to say. But I am at my word limit and I've made my point. If anyone can overlook what I've written so far… you might just enjoy this movie. I envy you. I wish I could like something so bad so easily.