Post a Comment        E-mail To A Friend        Join The List

Now On DVD: Greg Mottola, Superbad

by T.O. Lawrence
02/07/2008

I’m sorry, Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, you aren’t that funny. Cheap jokes, gay references and general silliness just aren't going to do it for me. Typecasting and zany bullshit won’t do it for me, either. I’m tired of having to hear such good things about you and later questioning the time I spent sneaking in to see your movies at the dollar show.

Superbad, the latest installment in their run of dull comedies the likes of Knocked Up and The 40-Year Old Virgin (OK, so I kinda liked that one), marks yet another mild-stone event that will be as quickly forgotten as any piss-poor teen movies of yesteryear. Never known for their particularly subtle wit, these masters of the overdone represent a concentrated dose of everything you’ve seen before only more expensive and better advertised.

Michael Cera plays Evan, a nervous, spindly, hormone-based mass whose awkward moments provide a lot of laughs but fail to do anything different or better than when he did the exact same thing in Arrested Development. Again on a quest for the impossible wet dream, instead of pining over his curly-headed cousin, he instead follows the lead of his curly-headed cohort, Seth (Jonah Hill) whose outrageous peer-pressuring and goofy obesity are staple punchlines for his parts of the film. And it’s difficult to ignore his striking similarities to Rogan, who penned him, in visage as well as in name. The trio is rounded out by the nerd-tastic Fogel (Christopher Charles Mintz-Plasse) whose name recalls screech in all of the terrible ways you’d expect.

The story of their adventures takes place over one crazy night where the goal is to get booze and get to a party to get to the girls who will get them laid. Like American Pie and Can’t Hardly Wait before it, this story is underscored by the drama of kids getting out of high school, parting ways and growing up. Their nightly goals reflect their quickly diverging paths, sending Fogel on a joy ride with two crazy-drunk police while the other two adventure off to find alcohol and the true meaning of friendship. Awww…

With jokes like Fogel’s fake I.D. name as “McLovin” and the occasional period blood fiasco, what your friends with poor taste once marketed to you as the next Napoleon Dynamite turns out to rely more on poor slapstick than brutally blank-face hilarity. I guess you could laugh when Seth does his hump-dance or his collection of penis-doodles, but then you probably also snort Ajax and quote things you heard from Dane Cook.

Almost every main character has played themselves before, Michael Sera, Jonah Hill and Seth Rogan as Officer Michaels just to name a few. Christopher Charles Mintz-Plasse even manages to be typecasted though this is his first movie, but looking at pictures of the kid you can understand why Dustin Diamond doesn’t have any money and why Mintz-Plasse will be playing this role until he one day checks himself into rehab.

This isn’t to say that anything is particularly bad about this movie, only that it appeals to the most basic and boring parts of you that might find something funny. The only scenes I really relished were those with the two police officers proving their past coolness to Fogel through complete disobedience and lawlessness. But again, this is coming from a person who watches COPS religiously as a document to the need for higher education. If you come looking for fart jokes, you will get them. Sex jokes? Those too. But original material? Not for many miles, kiddo. I’m afraid you’ll have to go find a rental for that one.

Name
Email
URL
Body
Are you human?