Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Bromates’ on Hulu, a Crass Comedy That Lil Rel Howery Can’t Liven Up

If the word “bromance” is on your banned-words list – and dammit, it should be – Bromates (now on Hulu) might not keep the water under your boat. It’s a raunch-com boasting Snoop Dogg as a triple threat – narrator, executive producer, on-screen actor playing himself – and staring Lil Rel Howery and Josh Brener (who I recognized as the doofy wimpus who was Marc Maron’s assistant on Maron) as two old buddies who move in together after their girlfriends dump their asses. Is that, you may be wondering, enough of a premise to hang a 90-minute movie on? 

BROMATES: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Sid (Brener) is a salesman for a solar-energy company. His girlfriend is Sadie (Jessica Lowe), a social media influencer who calls herself a “professional life liver.” If that isn’t a sign that he needs to get out of this relationship, I don’t know what is, but the choice is made for him when she leaves him for their neighbor, a doofus puppeteer who lives in the neighboring duplex unit. That way, Sid can listen to their crude graphic sexual noises, all involving puppets. Coincidentally, Sid’s lifelong pal Jonesie (Howery) is also suddenly single, which is what should happen when you get caught giving a sex swing a test run with a stripper. So Jonesie convinces Sid to move in with him and get away from the crude graphic sexual noises, all involving puppets, rendering them bros who are roommates or, in the parlance of the movie, room-os.

There’s barely any plot for the rest of Bromates, so maybe it’s one of those “hangout movies.” The question is whether it will be a slobbo/neat-freak Odd Couple type thing, or the kind of movie where the two principals argue about who will pull a used condom hanging out of a dog’s bung after the animal has swallowed and digested it. So yes, it’s the latter, and yes, it’s therefore a “hangout movie” in a disgustingly literal sense. The primary dynamic here is, Sid is a quiet dorkus and Jonesie is a wild man. Jonesie never got past the laughs-at-farts-and-boogers stage. Of his ex-girlfriend, he says, “She wanted me to grow up and get my shit together, and I REFUSE to do that.” He’s at least gainfully employed – for his company’s porta-potty business, so he knows a whole hell of a lot about being full of shit, rimshot!

Jonesie really wants Sid to let rip a little, and maybe give up on the bereavement support group, where everyone else is grieving a loved one, and he’s maybe not quite ready to ask out a sweet widow (Yossie Mulyadi), especially since she’s been carrying around her dead husband’s urn for years. Our boys decide they need to meet some women out in the wild, especially since Jonesie can’t convince Sid to sign up for the Nearsighted Big Booty Women Dot Com dating service like he did. They gather a couple other buddies, Angry Mike (Asif Ali) and Runway Dave (Brendan Scannell), and hit the karaoke bar, where Sid clicks with Darlene (Taryn Manning) mere moments before she has to jet home to Texas. So the group of guys decide to hop a plane for Amarillo and track her to a “redneck festival,” where toilet seats are tossed, ferret hijinks occur, sewage is sprayed from a hose and Snoop Dogg smokes down and quotes Shakespeare. Being an executive producer sure has its privileges.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Bromates reeks so badly of the laziest of Happy Madison productions (Just Go With It, Jack and Jill, That’s My Boy, etc.), I’m shocked that Nick Swardson isn’t in it.

Performance Worth Watching: Howery is funny in pretty much everything, as long as he has some halfway-decent lines to deliver.

Memorable Dialogue: And he has a couple:

Encouraging Sid to cut loose: “Go do something that’ll get you hit with a restraining order!”

To a porta-potty employee: “I could barely smell the piss and shit around here. You’re killin’ it!”

Sex and Skin: The sex swing gets more than just a trial run, right above poor Sid’s face while he’s sleeping.

Our Take: Bromates has all the elements of a stoner comedy, minus the weed. None of the characters hits the vape or the gummies or the dong-shaped bong until Snoop shows up deep in the final act. Ironically, it’ll take a large amount of mind-altering, intelligence-deadening substances to make us laugh at any of these jokes, which trade heavily in bodily fluids and stereotypes of mulleted rednecks y’alling violent threats and skittlebrained influencers duckfacing themselves into oblivion – sub-Joe Dirt junk.

Credit where credit’s due, though: Howery brings his omnipresent uptempo energy to any project, no matter how hacky, low-budget and uninspired it may be. Bromates is a sketch of a premise that becomes a loose collection of stapled-together gags. Sometimes Howery can turn crap into gold, but that’s just a metaphor – there’s plenty of crap in this movie, but very, very little gold.

Our Call: Bromates? More like this blows, mates! SKIP IT.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com.