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Written by Nick Da Costa | Saturday, April 5, 2008 |
Judd Apatow is God. And he wants to tell you a very funny, but very vulgar joke. And then he wants to tell you to f*ck off. A lot. Before hugging you. The End.
This crude distillation of the formula (and by this I mean the greatest formula until the one that cures cancer) that has given us such smashes as ‘40 Year Old Virgin‘ and ‘Knocked Up‘ now lands us with a perfect fusion of Porkies, Dazed and Confused and American Pie as high school best buds, Seth (Jonah Hill) and Evan (Michael Cera) attempt to enjoy their last two months together before parting ways for college, with sex, booze, Laurel and Hardy in cop form (Rogen and Hader) and…..McLovin (Christopher Mintz-Plasse).
Though Apatow takes only a producer’s credit here, his hallmarks are all over the film. From the same hilarious buddy dynamic we’ve seen with Rudd and Rogan in ‘Knocked Up’, the casting of regulars from his growing comedic company of actors to the sweet and a very sincere undercurrent of reality that surfaces whenever the relentless comedy gives it a chance to.
The leads are fantastic, sparking off each other one moment, Cera deadpanning straight man to Hill’s vulgar and furious front man, before slipping into moments of real insight and vulnerability as friends forced to relinquish the grip that holds them back from young adulthood. And all of this without slipping into the sappy clichés that ruin most films of the same genre. In fact when the duo is split up in the middle of the film, its really tangible, the machine gun banter of deadpan against verbal diarrhoea truly missed.
Scripted by Rogen and Evan Goldberg from their childhood recollections, this has the same mixture of wit, uncensored and unabashed vulgarity as Apatow’s previous films, unfortunately it also has the same ignorance of pacing. Though Mintz-Plasse is superb as the idiot savant McLovin, his Cops episode could seriously do with a little trimming and if it wasn’t for a climax that neatly sidesteps the tedium of happy endings with strike to the heart melancholia, this could have been a meandering mistake rather than the great feel-good movie that it is.
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