Never Goin' Back (2018)

Never Goin' Back review by Mark McPherson - Cinema Paradiso

Never Goin’ Back plays like a more true-to-life version of Two Broke Girls, mixing in the ugliness of being poor while still keeping the absurdity of a one-wild-day comedy. The two leads are not a chipper duo that scrounges for cash and can still afford a New York apartment, but vacation-hungry teenagers trapped in a Texas suburban wasteland who can barely afford utilities. They live a life of keeping water in the fridge, roommates that break their stuff, and parties laced with drugs. And if it weren’t for the movie trying to concoct them as a pair fit for the Dumb and Dumber profile, I might’ve felt more for them.

Maia Mitchell and Camila Morrone play the two rooming girls down on their luck. They work as waitresses where the boss is frustrated enough to want to fire them and their co-workers evil enough to push the pink slip forward. But they have a goal in sight, saving up money for a special vacation in their very near future. Of course, they won’t have such luck in a series of comical mishaps that turn their day rotten. Their gangster-style roommate (Kyle Mooney) will sell their stuff and cause trouble with his dopey ideas of drug-dealing and robbery that never come together. Their ineptitude in roommate choosing will result in being arrested. The girls need to get to work, but their uniforms are filthy and their water is shut off. The only place they can wash their clothes is at a friend’s house who happens to be throwing a party with lots of drugs. And so on.

This type of scenario would be able to hold its weight in empathy if it weren’t so cartoonish in its path for laughs. Consider a scene where Mitchell and Morrone are in a grocery store trying to cool themselves off and stealing some fruit. An older customer spots them and glares, only for the girls to fire back at him, calling him a sexual deviant and giving him the finger, because screw the world, right? There’s no karma for them here as they later discover this same guy is a massive sexual creep, taking disgusting photos at work. In that very same scene of discovery, there is a simultaneous poop and vomit joke; one girl takes a dump in a bucket while the other projectile pukes in someone’s direction.

Now, to be fair, I didn’t mind the gross-out aspects. These more physical gags are shot with an almost quaint grace, the way the vomit billows in slow-motion and how the girls’ drug trip through a restaurant is perfectly staged with music cues and an allure for pancakes. These are funny scenes, but they’re unfortunately hampered by characters that are hard to feel anything for. I wanted to root for Mitchell and Morrone to escape their suburban hell if only for a weekend, but there’s little to like about them. They have short fuses, associated with the worst people, stumble into work under the influence, and are generally gross. They’re rarely given a moment of humility where they learn something as they stumble around in a stupor for cash, resorting to letting the guy at the sandwich shop touch their boobs for money.

It’s not that trashy pictures of such characters can’t work, as evident from the films of Sean Baker. But what made those films work was that we believed in their world and understood their mindset. Never Goin’ Back only finds trashy silliness in its many scenarios of gross-out and mean gags. Again, to be fair, it’s not the first of its kind nor the worst, as there are far worse buddy-girl pictures that go the extra mile of absurdity, dumb, and poop. I just wish there were a little bit more to convince me to go back to this half-there comedy.