Superbad

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by Scott Cupper
8/30/07

Seth…………………Jonah Hill
Evan…………………Michael Cera
Fogell………………Christopher Mintz-Plasse
Officer Slater………Bill Hader
Officer Michaels…...Seth Rogen
Becca……………….Martha MacIsaac
Jules………………..Emma Stone

Directed by Greg Mottola
Written by Seth Rogen & Evan Goldberg

Rated R
Runtime: 1 hr 54 min.


This is perhaps my easiest review to write. Let me ask you this: Do you want to know the mind of a high school boy? If you’ve answered no, then don’t see Superbad.

For those who are sticking around, let me give you some other reasons to see Superbad.

It’s not the premise. It’s pretty simple. Seth (Jonah Hill) and Evan (Michael Cera) are two high schoolers who have thus far failed at women. Evan with Becca (Martha MacIsaac), the girl of his dreams, and Seth with every attractive girl, the only kind he’s interested in. This being their senior year, time is quickly running out, so they make it their quest to succeed. Or more accurately, Seth makes it their quest.

Fate shows it their friend when Seth gets invited to a party that night by Jules (Emma Stone) who is friendly. And attractive. This provides Evan the opportunity to invite Becca to the party. How can this fail? Then Jules drops the bomb: And, oh, can you bring the liquor?

Luckily, Seth and Evan’s faithful sidekick of a friend Fogell (Christopher Mintz-Plasse) is getting a fake I.D. that very afternoon. Fogell’s that friend that you wish you hadn’t had, but when you had so few friends to begin with, can you really turn one down? Particularly one who is providing you the key to your dreams? Until Fogell proudly hands over his fake I.D. with his chosen alias: McLovin’. Just McLovin’. Oh what are these boys to do?

A lot actually including getting punched, shooting guns, getting run over, stopping crime, cops, singing, running all in the quest for procuring alcohol. Basically, general craziness prevails for this section of the movie. I got the impression that when Seth Rogen (who co-wrote and plays a cop) and Evan Goldberg (just a writer, thank you) wrote this when they were 13, they realized they were going to have a 45-minute movie if they kept it up at this rate. So they put in a whole bunch of obstacles. A few are genuinely funny, some are amusing, and the rest are simply plot.

The biggest problem with this stretch is that Seth and Evan are separated at times. I don’t want to take anything from Christopher’s performance as Fogell. He has a unique energy that is a wonder in its own way. It’s just that Michael Cera and Jonah Hill are so, well, funny together that it’s lunacy that the movie keeps them apart at all. I’m trying to find words to describe how it is that they work so well together and I’m having a difficult time. Yes, Cera’s “Aw shucks” perverseness and Hill’s desperation complement one another well. But what it boils down to is that you believe their friendship. The conversation flows so naturally between them that you feel like a voyeur.

When’s he going to mention how raunchy it is? Well, yes it is, but that’s dismissive. The first 20 minutes is long, extended scenes that rely solely on dialogue. We follow Seth and Evan as they begin their day and all they do is talk. Sure, the movie is not above using a curse word so much that that’s the joke, but it’s also interested in how these words are used. If you’ve seen a Tarantino movie, he does the same thing. And the jokes are not all simple either. When Seth makes an analogy comparing his sex life and Orson Welles’s career, that’s a joke that takes some smarts to make the some smarts to get.

I said that Superbad gets a lot right about high school boys. For me, the biggest things that are how much they think about sex (constantly) and how much sex they actually have. I’ll leave that for you to discover.