Grab your fake ID’s and get ready to laugh at Superbad
What do you get when you involve members of multiple beloved yet tragically cancelled TV series, with a little foul language and some underage drinking? The long answer is a movie that may be one of the funniest I have seen in a long time. The short answer is “Superbad,” a new comedy co-Written by Seth Rogen of Freaks and Geeks and Undeclared, produced by Judd Apatow of the same, and starring Michael Cera of Arrested Development.
Unlike this summer’s previous Rogen/Apatow joint venture, Knocked Up, Superbad is a little less high concept, and a lot less dramatic. That isn’t to say it is free of character development or even an occasional touching moment, it just chooses to make a joke even out of those scenes as well. But where Knocked Up was very much trying to mix its humor with commentary on growing up and responsibility, successfully so, Superbad has no grand aspirations. It is a light-hearted, laid-back comedy that only spends the time on character development that it does in order to prevent the movie from feeling flat, and spends the rest of its energies on being truly entertaining.
The plot is simple, simple enough that it can be summed up in one sentence: two high school losers attempt to get booze for a party in order to win over their respective crushes. That’s pretty much it, and yet the movie plays out at almost two hours, leading us through the events of a single night in these boys’ lives, taking us in so many different directions that to try to plot out a course of events for you here would be detrimental to the viewer’s enjoyment, suffice to say it never begins to meander or slow down, as some comedies do, and never seems to be out of ideas for what its characters should do next.
The two main characters, Seth and Evan (named after its writers, the aforementioned Rogen and Evan Goldberg,) are played with nerd-embracement by Cera and slacker kid movie standard, Jonah Hill. Hill has worked his way through the Apatow movies, from his single scene in The 40 Year Old Virgin, to his supporting role, appropriately as the best friend of Rogen in Knocked Up, to a lead in Superbad, and Cera takes his first significant part since his three years spent on Arrested Development.
Once past the initial shock of hearing George Michael Bluth talk about porn and swearing, the pair are very successful at playing characters who are both innocent as hell, and yet not at all wholesome. Much like the Geeks half of Freaks and Geeks, these are kids whose lack of success with women stems mostly from their own shyness and social awkwardness, which keeps them from even registering on the radar of the girls that they desire. The boys of Superbad carry out their machinations with this in mind, in the hopes that they can accomplish the feat that will make them a blip on the girls’ scope, preparing them to make their moves.
The humor of the movie ranges from slapstick silly, to subtle wit, to cringe-worthy awkwardess, while avoiding for the most part the type of gross-out gag reflex jokes that litter the majority of youth comedies made in the past decade. No pies are banged, no feces are eaten, and aside from a little bit of drunken vomit and a very unlucky stain, bodily fluids remain mostly inside their hosts. I’m thankful for this personally, as I’ve always found character or situation based humor to be much funnier and much longer lasting than the shock of seeing someone go poo.
Grade: A-