Movie Review: This Is the End

3.5 stars out of 5

Wow, that Seth Rogen really enjoys the marijuana, doesn’t he? OK, we get it. Can we retire that as a comedic concept now? Thank you. That being said, Rogen and his buddy Evan Goldberg have slapped together a very entertaining, consistently funny movie with This Is the End. Not as good as Superbad but better than Pineapple Express, much better than Drillbit Taylor, and infinitely better than The Green Hornet. And also Your Highness, which his other buddy Danny McBride wrote. Ha ha ha rich guys smoking weed is hilarious.

Your Highness is very important to consider here, because it was a movie that I saw for free on a Tuesday at Clearview Cinemas with the Optimum Triple Play. For free I’ll see just about anything. But now the Clearview chain has changed hands; it is part of the Bow Tie Cinemas family. So long, free Tuesdays. We await Optimum’s promised announcement of a new movie discount. (It better be good; my building is now wired for FiOS.) And will my Clearview Advantage Card points transfer to Bow Tie’s Criterion Club®? So many vexing questions. In the meantime, I gots to go to the movies. Kind of an addict, you know? But would I become a more selective addict?

Enter Bow Tie’s “Super Tuesdays.” Six dollars for a movie. Now, six dollars ain’t free. And, it’s a dollar more than my Kerasotes Five Buck Club. Still, I can walk to the Hoboken Bow Tie theater. (Kerasotes is a schlep to Secaucus.) And then it hit me: If I go on Tuesday, skip the Pretzel Bites, skip the beverage, I’m still doing OK cost-wise. So even if This Is the End was as horrible as Your Highness….

And it’s not; it’s pretty damn funny. Yeah, it’s a kind of lazy, Rat Pack, buddies-making-a-movie-using-their-actual-names funny, but still pretty funny. Everybody plays themselves—James Franco, Jonah Hill, Rogen, and second-tier chums Craig Robinson, Jay Baruchel and the aforementioned McBride. And then all the rest of the extended Apatow/Rogen family is in this too: a wildly funny, playing-against-type Michael Cera, Jason Segal, blinked-and-I-missed-him Paul Rudd, etc. etc. Franco and Hill are particularly amusing throughout. The inside jokes and self-deprecation are generally pretty sharp (though an extended Pineapple Express sequel bit is self-indulgent). What surprised me is that the “scary”/end-of-the-world sequences were well-conceived and kept me in the story, i.e. they weren’t incredibly stupid.

The movie is a little long, the climax falls flat (this was the end?), and I miss my beloved Pretzel Bites. And if you don’t want to spend six dollars you can certainly wait till Netflix or cable. But I laughed a lot during This Is the End.