The 2014 film “Neighbors” cost $18 million to make and brought in $270 million worldwide. That is a spectacular, “Saw”-like return on investment, so it makes sense that the studio would be interested in making a sequel. There’s just one teensy little problem: there was nothing about “Neighbors” that lends itself well to a sequel. (Also, no one appears to have been asking for a sequel, but that is apparently beside the point.) It’s a film where the main characters each win a battle, but lose what’s left of their dignity. No bonds are forged, and the attempt at a happy ending drips with sadness. One of the first film’s good points was that they didn’t seem concerned about tomorrow because they were having too much fun today. Then tomorrow came, panic settled in, and for God knows what reason, the decision to not make a second film wasn’t considered. This is a mistake.

“Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising” isn’t even remotely tethered to reality. If this took place in the real world, at least two people would be dead and one would be in traction. It requires “Horrible Bosses 2” logic in order to work, which dictates that if you’ve been badly burned in your personal or professional life, you will learn absolutely nothing from the experience and make the same mistake again. “Horrible Bosses 2,” for the record, was another movie that no one asked for, and it made half as much as the original. Universal should prepare themselves for a similar drop-off.

Mac and Kelly Radner (Seth Rogen and Rose Byrne, respectively), now with a two-year-old and another baby on the way, have decided to sell their house and move to the suburbs. They have a family who wants to buy, and the house is put in escrow. The Radners do not understand that the sale is not final until their realtor spells it out for them for the sake of the plot (and the audience); the buyers have 30 days to back out of the deal for any reason. When Mac and Kelly see that a group of rebel girls wants to start a new party-friendly sorority in the abandoned house next door (the house previously owned by the Delta Psi Betas from the first film), they ask the girls to tone it down until the sale goes through. The girls are already annoyed that sororities are not allowed to throw parties, but fraternities are. They are not receptive to this request.

Meanwhile, Teddy (Zac Efron) is watching all of his frat bros move on with their lives, while his life is in a holding pattern thanks to the criminal record he obtained in the first film. It gets worse when he is asked to move out of his apartment, and out of desperation – and a need to feel appreciated – he strikes a deal with the new sorority to manage their finances, thus filling two holes in his life: the lack of respect, and it enables him to once again stick it to Mac and Kelly. Eventually, though, the girls turn on Teddy, so he switches teams.

Watching this movie was a similar experience to watching an episode of “Spongebob Squarepants.” The whole time I’m thinking, “You’re all idiots, and you deserve exactly what’s coming to you.” Mac and Kelly are the adults here, but even after the events of the first movie, they haven’t grown up at all. Teddy is just dense, so valuable lessons are going to come harder for him. The new sorority girls (Chloe Grace Moretz, Kiersey Clemons and Jonah Hill’s sister Beanie Feldstein) are 18 and the first ones to tell you that they’re idiots, which makes it easier to forgive them, but they’re idiots just the same.

The rest of the idiocy lies in the script. One scheme involves Mac and Kelly leaving their phones in places where their foes can compromise them. If you don’t trust your neighbors, would you ever leave your phone unattended? (That plot piece also involves Kelly, a protective mother bear, not hearing someone sneak behind her on their hardwood floors while she’s playing with her daughter. Right.) Teddy’s revenge plan is middle school depth at best, and the happy ending makes absolutely zero sense.

I felt sorry for Rose Byrne. She’s so much better than this – she stole the first film from Rogen and Efron – but she is slumming at a level that she has never slummed before (the opening scene, shudder). I hope she bought a country house with the money she made from doing this movie. Also, the corporate synergy at work here, repeatedly shoehorning another Universal property into this film, was galling.

It’s okay to make a good movie and not make a sequel to it. People have talked about doing a “Breakfast Club” sequel for decades, but even John Hughes, who wrote some bad scripts towards the end of his life, knew that was a terrible idea. “Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising” simply should not exist, and the world is a slightly sadder place because it does.

Director Paul Feig makes refreshingly nice comedies. There’s not a mean-spirited bone in his body. Not for a second does he ever poke fun at his characters. The creator behind one of the greatest and sweetest shows ever to grace television, “Freaks & Geeks,” loves all his characters – the screw-ups, the underdogs and even the bullies. That empathy has carried over to his feature film work. Although the laughs and appealing spirit of “Bridesmaids” was missing in “The Heat,” he’s quickly rebounded with “Spy,” a ferociously funny Melissa McCarthy star vehicle.

Susan Cooper (McCarthy) once dreamed of life as a CIA field agent. She imagined action, romance and intrigue. Instead of trotting the globe and saving the world, Susan performs her heroics behind a desk. The CIA analyst is super-spy Bradley Fine’s (Jude Law) eyes and ears. When the CIA’s top agents’ identities are exposed, though, Susan gets her chance to get out into the field. But putting the fate of the world into her hands doesn’t sit well with everybody – most notably, Rick Ford (Jason Statham), a spy who doesn’t believe he has any weaknesses. Ford and Cooper butt heads as she tracks down Bulgarian arms dealer Rayna Boyanov (Rose Byrne), who plans on selling a miniature nuclear weapon to the highest bidder.

As expected, Feig’s script is sharp. Never does “Spy” become parody or satire. The writer/director manages to poke fun at some genre conventions – Ford is James Bond and Jason Bourne combined, with some steroids thrown in for good measure – but never to the point where they overwhelm the emotional core and broad stakes of the film. Yes, “Spy” is a comedy, but Feig makes the action scenes have a real sense of danger. The violence is surprisingly and often comically brutal. Feig not only takes advantage of the R-rating in the language department, but also with bloodshed.

Anyone worried about how the director is going to fare with the upcoming “Ghostbusters” movie, worry no more. Feig actually has some real action chops as a filmmaker: there’s almost always a clear sense of geography in the action scenes; the set pieces move plot and character forward; and even when “Spy” gets bloody, there’s still tonally appropriate laughs. Even after seeing someone’s throat melt, Feig interjects a terrific joke that doesn’t undo the horror of that sight.

In many ways, Feig has grown as a filmmaker. He’s a very clever storyteller, but he’s not without his indulgences. Like “The Heat” and, to a lesser extent, “Bridesmaids”, “Spy” is bloated. The two-hour film has about 100 minutes of plot. Towards the big climax, the film becomes a tad exhausting. There’s a redundant twist that takes up more time than it should, jokes go on longer than they need to, and even the post-credits scene doesn’t know when to stop. Less is more, as shown by the film’s finest jokes.

Melissa McCarthy is terrific. She makes Susan an easy character to root for, and Feig gives her a genuine arc. Susan’s big emotional moment in the third act isn’t careless or just thrown in there, as is the case with most comedies. Her journey was carefully considered, making her funnier and more human. The real stars of the show, though, are Rose Byrne and, playing a flirty Italian spy, Peter Serafinowicz. Jason Statham is very funny, but almost too prominent at times, while Serafinowicz is used perfectly in small doses. Not a single line that comes out of his or Byrne’s mouth falls flat.

“Spy” rarely goes for an easy joke; there are so many wonderful setups and payoffs. On top of that, hardly any gags come from McCarthy falling down. There’s nothing lazy about “Spy.” Despite the bloat, Paul Feig’s latest is a smart and often heartfelt comedy.

Everything about “Neighbors” screams bro – had we been tasked with pitching the script to a producer, we would have said, “’Tin Men,’ with bros” – and then a funny thing happens: Rose Byrne comes along and wipes the floor with every man in the cast. She puts on a master class in comedy here, and in the process (unintentionally, for sure), she out-funnys the funny guy. This is okay, mind you, and in fact wouldn’t even be a problem if the movie had a coherent script, but it doesn’t. It’s a funny script, and it hits all of the right notes in the end, but the path it takes to get there is dubious, to be sure. Someone, anyone, should have gotten arrested.

New parents Mac and Kelly Radner (Seth Rogen and Byrne) have bought a new home, and love their idyllic grown-up existence. The house next door is up for sale, and to their horror, a fraternity moves in. Mac and Kelly, eager to maintain their youth while dealing with being new parents, try to play the part of the cool neighbors at first, but as the frat’s continuous late-night antics threaten to wake their baby girl, they call the police on them after their attempts to contact them go unanswered. The president of the fraternity, Ted (Zac Efron), declares war, and the two sides engage in a series of escalating stunts designed to put the other side down for good, yet they’re strangely chummy the entire time.

This movie could have had it all if the script was even remotely grounded, but there are too many instances where they go for the big joke at the expense of all logic and reason. There’s the funny bit in the trailer where Mac sits in his office chair and gets blasted through the ceiling. It’s hilarious, but it doesn’t make sense. How were Ted and his bros even able to finagle that? Mac and Kelly have sex in the living room, while the entire fraternity and their guests watch. Did they really not consider shutting the drapes? The script has a ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy about these and many other setups, and it only would have taken one scene or even a single line of dialogue to make these moments believable. It’s a pity that screenwriters need to be reminded to sell the joke, to invest the audience in the setup as well as the payoff. Jokes without reason are just noise.

There is also a darker subplot that would have been fascinating to explore, but it is completely ignored. Kelly pulls a stunt at one of the frat parties that’s so manipulative and cunning that it should have done one of two things: scared Mac out of his wits (“Damn, she’s capable of doing that?”), or awoken something in Kelly that has long slumbered (“Damn, I’m capable of doing that?”). It does neither, and the movie is a lot less interesting as a result. One of the key plots in “Tin Men” is that the alpha males seek dominance over each other by seducing their opponent’s wife. “Neighbors” does not go down that route, and while that is the smart move in order to keep the movie from getting too dark, the fact is they make a point of showing the audience that Kelly is a bored housewife living next door to a guy who looks like Zac Efron. After seeing what Kelly does at that party, the Ted/Kelly plotline has tons of potential. Dark potential, but potential nonetheless. Mac and Kelly’s baby also conveniently sleeps through the night every time she’s required to, emphasis on the word ‘convenient.’ (For those who don’t have kids, it doesn’t work that way. Ever.)

“Neighbors” will overcome its flaws with its target audience, of course, because it’s a bro flick, and bros will see it with little regard to what critics have to say about it. And that’s fine – it’s an amusing film, with a mercifully short run time of 96 minutes, and Dave Franco does a spot-on Robert De Niro impression. It could have been better, though, and it wouldn’t have even taken a lot of work to make it significantly better. A great opportunity was missed here.

“Get Him to the Greek” could easily become this summer’s “The Hangover,” a rollicking comedy filled with enough laughs to keep you out of the heat for an hour and 49 minutes. Bob Westal at our entertainment blog, Premium Hollywood, had a chance to catch up with the cast from the “Get Him to the Greek” as well as the film’s director, Nicholas Stoller.

“The big movements of this story really locked into place pretty quickly,” Stoller said. “I knew that I wanted to go to London, New York, Vegas and LA. I knew it needed to end with a threesome. There were like a few things I knew very early on — ‘I’m building towards this threesome, how do we get there? Really, every movie should end with a threesome. That’s my comedy theory — it’s in Syd Field’s Screenplay. ”

There you have it. Three of the world’s greatest cities, two of comedy’s funniest people, and a director (who’s not in porn, mind you) who just came out and said his whole film is “building towards this threesome.” Check out our “Get Him to the Greek” review to see how Stoller pulled together the summer’s first solid comedy.