"This is the End" is the Last Straw

Let me preface this little rant with the caveat that I haevn't seen "Superbad." For all I know, it could be a towering work fo comedic genius, one that avoids the pitfalls of everything else that Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg have written since. However, having seen "Pineapple Express," "The Green Hornet," and now "This is the End," I've just about had it with these two and their doofusy dudebro milieu.

I was looking forward to "This is the End" since before I saw the first trailers. A group of familiar actors playing caricatured versions of themselves trying to survive the Biblical end of days? James Franco being an insufferable pretentious twit? Michael Cera as an out-of-control scumbag? Celebrities being offed en masse by the fiery wrath of the apocalypse? The premise sounded hysterical, with loads of potential for self mockery and Hollywood satire. Pity that all that potential was pretty much wasted.

It all starts off perfectly well. Jay Baruchel takes a trip down to Los Angeles, staying with his old buddy Seth Rogen, and trying to address the fact that the two have been drifting apart. They go to James Franco's housewarming party, where a gaggle of stars put in cameos. Then disaster hits, and Baruchel, Rogen, Franco, Craig Robinson, and Jonah Hill find themselves stuck in Franco's house while all hell breaks loose outside. With limited supplies and no information about what's going on, their prospects are bleak. Encounters with Emma Watson (too brief) Danny McBride (not brief enough) make their situation more dire.

The fact that these are all horrible people whose worst traits come out in a crisis didn't bother me. The fact that they're all vulgar, venal, self-obsessed, and stupid louts whose attempts a teamwork are doomed from the start didn't either. It's that they're not funny, except in the most immature and lowbrow way, that really ticked me off. "This is the End" features sex and masturbation jokes galore, endless childish bickering, and the constant indulgence of the worst parts of the male ego. Rogen and Goldberg have certain obsessions with the layabout stoner lifestyle that were acceptable in "Pineapple Express," a lousy fit for "The Green Hornet," and just plain aggravating in "This is the End." By the midpoint of the movie. I wanted everyone onscreen to die, just so I wouldn't have to keep listening to their whining.

You can write pretentious, awful people in a funny way. Another recent apocalypse comedy, "It's a Disaster," did a perfectly fine job of showing a group of yuppie brunchers going to pieces in the face of certain doom. What bothered me the most about "This is the End" is that it sets the bar so, so, maddeningly low. It hardly says a thing about Hollywood or celebrity culture. The stars don't dig into their personal lives for much material, so they barely come off as actual characters. The Jay and Seth relationship is supposed to be the heart of the story, but it's pretty slight stuff, and handled in the most obvious way possible. And the religious themes? Positively cartoonish. I recognize that my own preferences play a lot into my bad reaction here - I avoid crude content when I can - but I respect the films that manage to be otherwise clever and self-aware like "Ted" and most Judd Apatow films. "This is the End" isn't even trying.

Take the fake "Pineapple Express" sequel that the guys put together to pass the time. Those who didn't see the first movie wouldn't know that several of the actors from "This is the End" appeared in it, so the significance of it would be lost. It's not particularly funny by itself, just a collection of quick clips of the guys acting out moments similar to what we saw in "Pineapple Express." It doesn't move the story forward or say anything interesting about the characters, which it easily could have been made to do. One suspects that it was only included because this was the only version of a "Pineapple Express" sequel that the stars thought they would ever get the chance to make. Fortunately, it doesn't eat up much time.

The momentum does pick up in the second half somewhat, when it is established that the movie is following the Revelations playbook, and the characters acquire actual goals. We get a few action sequences and lots of fancy special effects that are impressive enough to temporarily distract from the rest of the movie. There's an extended parody of a very old film that yields some good things, and I enjoyed the very, very last scene for the utterly incongruous absurdity of it. However, it also emphasizes that this is a movie written by and intended for overgrown teenagers who are still obsessed with self-gratification and recreational drugs. I'm surprised that it has managed to appeal to anyone else.

Finally, I find it all too appropriate that one of the next Goldberg and Rogen projects is going to be an adult animated feature about a talking sausage. That seems to be about right for their maturity level.
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