Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Buddy Games: Spring Awakening’ on Showtime, a Flatulent Farce Directed By and Starring Josh Duhamel

Apparently Josh Duhamel’s directorial debut, 2020’s vomitorious bro-comedy Buddy Games, found enough traction in the streaming realm to inspire a mini franchise of sorts, delighting testicle and feces joke enthusiasts everywhere. The movie spun off a new reality/competition series debuting on strike-stricken/content-deprived network television (CBS, if you must know), as well as the topic of this here scathing takedown, movie sequel Buddy Games: Spring Awakening, which reunites four of the core cast members form the first flatulent disaster for a fresh series of gross-ass escapades – but this time, with more “woke” jokes, lawd help us all.

BUDDY GAMES: SPRING AWAKENING: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: One assumes Dax Shepard had better things to do than this movie – pretty surprising for the guy who was in Let’s Go to Prison – so his character gets killed off, off-screen. So we open on Durfy’s funeral, where we learn his real first name is Murphy. Yep, Murphy Durfy; please try not to laugh yourself into a coma, since I’d bet 100 smackers your health insurance won’t cover it. His best pals Bobfather (Duhamel), Bender (Nick Swardson), Shelly (Dan Bakkedahl) and Doc (Kevin Dillon) eulogize their buddy appropriately: Anecdotes about boogers, followed by Shelly sobbing, “When I lost my nuts, Durfy always treated me like a person who had nuts,” a reference to how he lost his nuts in a tragic paintball catastrophe in the first movie. This type of horseshit doesn’t sit well with Durfy’s j-hole brother, who angrily chases the four slobs as they play keep-away with the urn full of Durfy, then escape in Bobfather’s helicopter. As you do.

You may recall that the core premise of this franchise is that these guys get together every so often to play the Buddy Games, a weekend of brolympic activities that involve extreme drunkenness, extreme humiliation and extreme trauma to sensitive body parts. SO MUCH FUN. And so it’s appropriate that Bobfather, Bender, Shelly and Doc want to spread their pal’s ashes at the site of the very first Buddy Games – but they arrive to find that it’s a bacchanal for young, bethonged spring breakers who’ve co-opted our guys’ extremely stupid extreme-sports tournament. That doesn’t stop them from participating, of course, so cue up a montage of drink-til-you-puke, play-football-til-you-puke, wrestle-til-you-puke and clamber-through-an-obstacle-course-til-you-puke games. If you can make it through this sequence without puking, congratulations! Your stomach must be lined with tungsten.

But that’s not the whole movie. Oh, no. It’s far more ambitious than that. Once our four pudding-brained homunculi finish the competition, they meet a loonybird named Phoenix (Carmel Amit), who invites them to a party so they can hang out with weirdos and do hallucinogenic drugs until the movie resembles a sixth-generation xerox of a Cheech Marin nightmare acid flashback. More importantly, they’re the old shithead Gen-Xers among much younger revelers, who yearn to force our heroes into a state of politically correct wokeness. Will these enlightened whippersnappers be able to wash that toxic masculinity right out of their brains? NO SPOILERS, but I think they don’t quite meet the prerequisite of, you know, actually having brains.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: The Buddy Games movies are like The Hangover if all the principals had their grey matter removed with a hook through the nasal cavity like the ancient Egyptians did to mummies.

Performance Worth Watching: Is this the right place to mention that Swardson continues to deliver the most repulsive, unappealing and desperate performances I’ve ever seen, dating back to Grandma’s Boy? No? Well, shit.

Memorable Dialogue: Here’s a few doozies for ya:

“I just peed a little. Actually, I just peed a lot.”

“I tore my taint playing football.”

“Most men don’t like to kiss a wookiee that much. But you were like Pac-Man down there!”

Sex and Skin: Butts and boobs but no full male frontal this time, thank the deities.

Our Take: Spring Awakening improves upon the shittiness of the first Buddy Games, and by that I mean it’s shittier than its shitty predecessor. Duhamel and co. at least show signs of progress, evolving the first movie’s strictly-bodily-fluids brand of comedy towards something resembling satire and socio-political commentary; it even concocts a Midsommar parody of sorts, accidental or otherwise. That doesn’t stop it from being truly awful, though. It point-blank potshots big, easy targets with nothing remotely resembling wit or insight. Granted, “cancel culture” and “wokeness” are ripe for ribbing, but to do so effectively requires something greater than this movie’s sub-planarian level of intelligence. 

An undeservingly generous interpretation of Spring Awakening could assert that it functions as commentary on the current state of comedy films, which tend to avoid the type of bad-taste Bachelor Party/Revenge of the Nerds horny/gross overtures of the 1980s and ’90s. This movie indulges some of that – e.g., the camera ogles bikini’d women as they drunkenly wrestle on the beach – before attempting to undercut the inevitable criticism by turning its guns on the post-Gen-X generations and the straw-man lefty critics who’d theoretically shred the film for being crassly sexist and at least borderline homophobic, if they bother to watch it in the first place, which they surely won’t. Hell, even some of the target demographic won’t bother with this thin comedy gruel, urped up as it is by third-stringers hamstrung by a script so radioactively bad, they probably had to wear hazmat suits while handling it. 

I worry I’ve implied that this movie – in its reactionary and hamfisted attempt to push back against perceived threats to the state of comedy – boasts something resembling an overarching theme, because it has none. Such satirical fodder is just one lump of moldering quasi-comic gristle thrown into a spoiled stew alongside fatty wads of puerile, repetitive stoner humor and instances of adult men bonding over their farts and boners. The only consistent element to Spring Awakening is its interminable stupidity.

Our Call: <Insert toilet-flushing sound here> SKIP IT. 

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.