THIS IS THE END
DIRECTORS: Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg
CAST: Seth Rogen, Jay Baruchel, James Franco, Jonah Hill, Danny McBride, Emma Watson.
CLASSIFICATION: 16DHLSV
RUNNING TIME: 106 minutes
RATING: ***
The seemingly exhausted gross-out comedy genre gets a strange temporary reprieve with This is the End, an unlikable but weirdly compelling apocalyptic fantasy in which a bunch of young stars and stars-by-affiliation jokingly imagine their own mortality.
A sort-of The Day of the Locust centred on successful comic actors, rather than down-and-outers, facing a conflagration in Los Angeles, this is a dark farce that’s also self-deprecating, self-serving, an occasion to vent about friends and rivals and to fret about self-worth in a cocooned environment.
With everyone here officially playing themselves, the result is like a giant home movie and a reality horror show – different enough from anything that’s come before to score with young audiences.
With the Hangover series outliving its welcome, Judd Apatow’s moving on to quasi-serious stuff and 21 & Over and Movie 43 falling short, outrageous comedies aren’t what they used to be a few years ago.
Early in This is the End, James Franco and Seth Rogen explore story ideas for a possible Pineapple Express sequel, but it’s hard to know, five years on, what the public appetite would be even for that.
Instead, Rogen and co-writer and co-director Evan Goldberg reached back to 2007 for inspiration, to a nine-minute short they and Jason Stone made called Seth and Jay Versus the Apocalypse.
The central conceit is that this is a film about the young and privileged of showbiz who are supposedly being honest about their sense of entitlement, their access to constant sex, drugs and money, neuroses and special bonds, professional and personal.
This isn’t Franco and Rogen and Michael Cera and everyone else playing characters getting trashed on coke and weed. This is a movie in which audiences can get off seeing actual movie stars behaving like stupid rich frat boys. At least that’s the sense of special access This is the End is purporting to afford viewers.
The occasion is a housewarming party at Franco’s dazzling new house (“Designed it myself,” the actor-writer-director-grad student modestly points out).
The modernist mansion is just down the way from the Hollywood sign and yet within easy walking distance of convenience stores. The first 15 minutes are crammed with pretty funny party banter, star sightings – Emma Watson, Rihanna, Mindy Kaling, Cera being serviced by two babes at the same time – and the overweening discomfort of Baruchel, who’s come down from Canada to visit his best bud, Rogen, and outdoes Woody Allen in his expressions of distaste for Los Angeles and the people who live there, especially the hated Hill, with whom he’s now obliged to hang out.
But in a startling manner, a biblical-scale disaster strikes in the form of explosions, rumblings, the ground opening up, fires raging, cars crashing and shafts of light beaming down from the heavens.
Los Angeles is burning and many guests are swallowed up by a lava-filled sinkhole while others flee into the acrid night.
In the end, those left in the seeming sanctuary of Franco’s crib are Rogen, Baruchel, Hill, Craig Robinson and Franco, who arms himself with a World War I vintage pistol left over from Flyboys.
So This is the End goes places you don’t expect it to, exploring the guys’ rifts, doubts and misgivings just as it wallows in an extravagant lifestyle. It also expresses the anxiety and insecurity of comics conscious of the big issues in life they’re expected to avoid or make fun of in their work. Rogen and Goldberg poke fun in an immature but sometimes surprisingly upfront way one can interpret seriously. Or not. – Hollywood Reporter
If you liked Seeking a Friend for the End of the World you will like this.