This Is the End

Remember when movies were made out of Saturday Night Live sketches and they almost never worked?  It's not exactly a science, but that gut-busting exhilaration that can come from a nugget of an idea can spawn something magical within the confines of a five minute interval.  This Is the End, the Seth Rogen and friends end of the world comedy hour, could have been a gleefully hysterical, perhaps even transcendent, otherworldly thing of funny had it been filtered through, say- a "Funny or Die" segment or even maybe as a thirty-minute situation comedy for lofty and uncensored stations like HBO or Showtime, however as a feature film (a plodding one that which meanders for over a hundred minutes) it, well, kinda thuds.  For sure there's laughs here, but it's all punchline with no setup-- Entourage played out with the revolving door of Judd Apatow alums while a sub-Blazing Saddles reinterpretation of 2012 blares outside.   

This stoner, R-rated, more "meta" than can be handled apocalypse buddy picture was written and directed by Rogen and longtime partner Evan Goldberg, who previously crackled the now seemingly innocent Superbad (2007) and the similarly tempered ultra violent, cuddly buddy picture Pineapple Express (2008).  It's the first time either have directed a film before, and it shows.  While it's true that their oeuvre hasn't exactly lead itself to strongly finessed, nor particularly tightly packaged movies in the past (though David Gordon Green brought his auteur hat to the mix with Pineapple Express), This Is the End looks and feels like a crummy goof-of session between bong hits given a go as a feature film.  Even as a gooey slime of cheese, it doesn't look endearingly scrappy in that cheap, homemade sense, but plain, ugly and crappy.  Visual aesthetics aside, and more to the point, is that the film feels in every sense a house party of famous pals joshing around and around and around.  Again, I state, as a sketch, it could have been gold.