This is the End is loud, obnoxious, crude, lewd, profane and brilliant! I haven’t laughed this hard since Superbad.
Written and directed by Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, This is the end is allegedly about a group of famous friends – Rogen, Jay Baruchel, Craig Robinson, Jonah Hill, Michael Cera and more – getting together for a party at James Franco’s house (‘I designed it!’ he proudly proclaims)… and The Apocalypse hits!
That’s it. That’s your plot. What follows is a series of riffs on every party movie you’ve ever seen; every end of the world movie you’ve ever seen; and the systematic construction and destruction of the audience’s perceptions of who these guys are.
Some of the best bits in the movie come from seeing the cast members play out variations of their public personas – Rihanna taking care of an obnoxious fan; Franco working that hyphenate (actor-director-artist-et cetera ad nauseum) thing; Danny McBride taking his gift for playing truly horrendous characters to the ultimate – and some of them come from playing against them (Ladies and gentlemen – Emma Watson!).
The trailers for This is the End have been pretty funny, but they are the tip of the proverbial comedic iceberg. I can’t even imagine what it must have been like sitting in the room with Rogen and Goldberg (‘So Rihanna decks him’ ‘and then people start to …’ ‘Hermione does WHAT?’ ‘And then there’s this big a$$..!’), but I can almost get a glimmering of the on-set riffs that expanded from the finished script (80% of which probably went the way of the dodo during the ensuing improvisation).
And when the special effects really kick in (what part of The Apocalypse did you not get?), they are superbly executed – creepy, scary and just the teensiest bit funky.
Make no mistake about it, This is the End will offend a lot of people (the humorless and the most hidebound of Christians, especially). Unless you mom is Joy Behar, Whoopee Goldberg or Kathy Griffin, the chances are you won’t want to take her to this one. That doesn’t make it any less funny, though.
I can just see the suits looking at the box office numbers after this weekend and saying, ‘Well, we can’t do a straight up sequel – but what if we got the cast of Bridesmaids to be having a girls’ night out elsewhere in Hollywood AT THE SAME TIME??? Genius, right?’
Final Grade: A
Photo courtesy of Columbia Pictures