Just as I finish my degree Hollywood's most affable group of comedy actors decide to make a film that culminates with the world as we know it ending. It spoke to me on several levels.
From the get go the film feeds the audience a steady supply of mild chuckles, with best friends Seth Rogen and Jay Baruchel sharing a few light-hearted spliffs (what else?) which, inevitably, leads to a course of man on man humping. This early display of boyish humour and hashed together montages really sets the tone for the rest of the film- although, by the end, two fully grown men scissoring each other on the living room floor will seem relatively normal.
The film then steps up the laughs when our two main protagonists move over to James Franco's boudoir for a A-list party that features several scene stealing cameos from Michael Cera. Cera plays the cocaine fueled sex pest in such hilarious dead pan fashion that it begs the question- why does he leave the party so early? The Superbad star's presence is rare in the sense that it adds to the film, wherein a lot of other exerts could have been chopped out and it would have had minimal impact on the laugh-meter.
"WE'RE PLAYING A GAME JASON!".
This is when things move from baffling to mind boggling, and for the most part, it tickled my pickle.
Eugh, that analogy just made me think of the Devil pumping horn sporting sperm into Jonah Hill.
The most satisfying thing about the film is that the majority of the laughs are unexpected due to the improvised nature of the dialogue. It may come in the form of a subtle facial expression from the softly spoken yet sinister Jonah Hill, the garish jizz fanatic Danny McBride, or a combination of the actors who, it has to be said, excel as an ensemble cast.
The film inevitably becomes a bit wayward at times and whilst the threadbare "buddies in crisis" narrative between Seth and Jay just about manages to hang together the film occasionally suffers from misdirection. Something can be momentarily hilarious and then it take a premature dip, or a joke can be elongated to the point where the only person still laughing is that wierdo at the back wearing a Donnay cap. This could have been easily resolved with some brutal editing but I'm kind of clutching at straws (not matches, thankfully) in terms of highlighting an obvious negative .
The films target audience is undoubtedly male, and I'd go as far as to say that the "laddish" humour may be quite suffocating for a female audience, probably best encapsulated by a rape gag concerning Hermoine Granger. However, none of the material is taken too seriously, with the actors managing to maintain an equilibrium between funny and offensive by often bringing the focus back to themselves with a well tuned self deprecating style.
I watched it with a group of friends and we were in stitches start to finish. The resounding opinion from my compadres was that they hadn't laughed as much since the first Hangover.
Purely in comedy terms I'd give it 4 stars, definitely not the smartest film, but brutal, gratuitous and joyfully ridiculous.
Have a good one folks.
0 comments:
Post a Comment