Don’t you be my neighbor

I almost hate to say it, but Neighbors goes directly onto my guilty pleasures list. Nowhere near the top, to be sure, but it’s there, mainly because it’s pretty damn funny.

Seth Rogen and Rose Byrne play Mac and Kelly Radner, a nice middle-class couple with a new baby named Stella, a new house in a nice neighborhood, and a determination to prove that a baby and a mortgage don’t have to turn them into a couple of old fuddy-duddies.

Their resolve is put to the test when the moving truck arrives next door, and their new neighbors turn out to be the members of the local university’s chapter of Delta Psi Beta fraternity.

As the frat boys and their trophy girlfriends cart their couches, hazing paddles, neon beer signs and large plywood Greek letters onto the premises, Mac and Kelly hope to nip any noisy parties in the bud, but they want to do it without looking uncool. They frantically rehearse ways to say “Keep it down” without sounding like a couple of uptight oldsters; they even take a joint over to the new neighbors as a peace offering. They go further than that, just to prove how cool they are: They party all night with the frat—keeping their baby monitor handy, of course—and Mac bonds with the frat’s president and leader Teddy (Zac Efron) over a baggie full of magic mushrooms. As they part in the dawn’s early light, Mac promises Teddy that any time the frat parties get too loud, he’ll call Teddy rather than the cops.

The pact doesn’t last. At the next wild weeknight party, after trying to call 10 times, Mac and Kelly finally break down and call the cops, hoping to remain anonymous. But they forget to take caller ID into account, and Teddy regards this as an act of war. After that, it’s every neighbor for himself.

The script by first-timers Andrew J. Cohen and Brendan O’Brien is short on logic, and the arc of the story seems to skip over scenes, suggesting that they were either never written, never filmed or left on the cutting-room floor in the interests of keeping the joke parade rolling. Mac and Kelly’s best friends, a divorced couple named Jimmy (Ike Barinholtz) and Paula (Carla Gallo), have a couple of funny scenes early on. Jimmy commiserates with Mac on the crimp in his and Kelly’s sex life with a new baby in the house (“She’s got these enormous tits,” laments Mac, “but she insists on wearing a wife-beater. It’s like fucking Tony Soprano”). Later, Paula urges the two to join her at a hot dance party and bring little Stella along (“Baby’s first rave!”), but the preparations wear them out, and they fall asleep on their way out the door.

Jimmy and Paula become the Radners’ accomplices in their neighborhood war, but once Paula hooks up with an incredibly well-endowed frat boy (Christopher Mintz-Plasse, also underused), both she and Jimmy drop out of the action until too late. Similarly, Lisa Kudrow has a great couple of scenes as a college dean unsympathetic to Mac and Kelly’s plight, but again, there’s not enough for her to do—and a sense that more of her may turn up among the outtakes on the DVD.

As Teddy, Efron gives an intriguing performance, but it seems to be piped in from an entirely different movie. His Teddy is—somewhere under his shirtless bravado—terrified of graduating into the real world and maybe someday winding up like Mac, yelling over the fence at other frat boys to keep it down. He’s aware that his frat’s vice president Pete is a lot smarter than he is, and he squirms at the barely suppressed gay subtext to their “bros before hos” buddyhood. A closing scene of rueful truce between Mac and Teddy awkwardly but sweetly melds the two movies together.

Director Nicholas Stoller keeps the action moving, but he can’t iron out its wrinkles, and he doesn’t seem to realize when a comic idea doesn’t pan out—a sequence of the Radners’ panic at finding Stella playing with a discarded condom goes nowhere and isn’t funny, and in retrospect, I couldn’t help wondering what might have been cut out, or never included, to make room for scenes like this.

There are more laughs than duds among Neighbors’ wild array of jokes, and I came away amused. But the movie has enough misfires and missed chances to put the “guilt” in guilty pleasure.