Most of the time, Zac Efron isn’t a very good actor. In projects as varied as That Awkward Moment, We Are Your Friends, Dirty Grandpa, The Paperboy, and At Any Price, he’s had opportunities to play all manners of comedy, drama, and romance, and he approaches it all with the same himbo blankness. Yet something happens to Efron when he plays Teddy Sanders, the frat-boy frenemy of new parents Mac (Seth Rogen) and Kelly (Rose Byrne) in Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising, just as it did in the original Neighbors. Efron imbues his handsome-dope routine with such nuance that Teddy is not only funny but also touching in his sincere desire for brotherhood, in short supply postgraduation. What could have been simplistic self-parody becomes a genuinely, almost confusingly terrific performance.
It’s not just that the Neighbors 2 screenwriters (a five-man team) write better jokes for Efron than he gets anywhere else, though they do. Their screenplay also approaches Teddy and every other character in Neighbors 2 with a real sense of empathy that goes a long way toward mitigating the pointlessness of making a Neighbors 2 at all. The first film worked fine on its own as a story of generational conflict between two groups that didn’t want to believe they could be in a generational conflict: the formerly cool young parents and their friendly neighborhood frat boys. In the comedy-sequel tradition, Neighbors 2 replays the dynamic from the first movie, but more so. Now Mac and Kelly have a second baby on the way and want to sell their house, not just get a good night’s sleep. Just as their potential sale enters escrow (which involves a funny scene in which they admit that they don’t actually remember what escrow is or how it works), a sorority starts renting the house next door, where Teddy’s fraternity used to rage.