For those of you who blessedly missed the original “Buddy Games” (2020), the directorial debut of actor Josh Duhamel, it told the tale of a group of six loathsome friends who reunite after a five-year estrangement to compete against each other in a series of stupid and often-disgusting contests they've been doing for years. (In one, the guys consume powerful laxatives and then see who can go the longest hitting on women in a bar before the inevitable occurs.) Here was a film that opened with a sequence in which a character gets his testicles blown off with a paintball gun (the act that inspired the aforementioned estrangement) and proceeded to go downhill from there. But the worst thing about it was that it gave us six of the most fatuous, odious, self-absorbed, and generally unlikable bro types ever created and then tried to gaslight viewers into sympathizing with them because of their bravery in standing up to an increasingly woke world they no longer understand. When it was all over, viewers could at least cling to the comfort that if Duhamel were allowed to direct again, it would almost have to be a step up from his debut. Oops.
This time around, four of the six—Bobfather (Duhamel, also returning as director and producer), Doc (Kevin Dillon), Shelly (Dan Bakkedahl), and Bender (Nick Swardson)—have absconded with the ashes of their late comrade, struggling actor Durfy (the one played by Dax Shepard in the original), and are determined to scatter them at the beach resort where they first devised the all-important Buddy Games that evidently remain their sole focus in life. (The other member, the gay Zane [James Roday Rodriguez], is left behind, primarily to set up a joke where he has to hide in his house from the deceased’s unhappy family and complain about going back into the closet.) The group is then startled to discover that spring breakers overrun the town and that the bar where they used to hang out has been running its own version of the Buddy Games. They are then compelled to enter against much younger teams.
Having established that less-than-startling premise, "Spring Awakening" tosses it aside to replace it with something infinitely worse. After going to an all-night party where they get wasted in wacky ways—one of them randomly eats mushrooms and discovers they are psychedelics—the guys are separated. Bob and Bender end up in the clutches of a bizarre cult led by the deranged Phoenix (Carmel Amit) that is determined to find alpha male types and put them through various tortures, hoping they will shed their manly ways and become well and truly woke. Meanwhile, Doc and Shelly set off in search of the woman that Durfy loved throughout that long-ago summer, on the belief that she has clearly been pining for him ever since. This quest leads them to a bed-and-breakfast run by a woman who is both horny and grotesque and later requires them to cook and eat a skunk at one point.
