I know that some may think that I am just being high-minded and prudish but vulgarity and political rudeness are not necessarily what I am complaining about. I am complaining about the simple lack of an actual approach from director Hill in dealing with this kind of material. He thinks that pushing as far as he can go in terms of political incorrectness and crudeness will be enough to get the laughs. But as I have said before, shock humor is the easiest, knee-jerk way to try to get a laugh. It takes real wit and a conviction in the situation to redeem it for catharsis. Think of some of the dark British comedies like Hot Fuzz or Shaun of the Dead that alternate tones with ease and the key is that they manage to create a fully realized and somehow believable absurdity within their scenarios rather than having the characters just performing and spouting out cheap and inane vulgarities. Without a consistent credibility in character or situation, you have a movie that is uneven and tone-deaf.
The dearth of overall inspiration extends to the casting as well. Besides Rogen who seems either unwilling or unable to take himself seriously enough to just dive into his character, most everyone else seems predictably and lazily typecast. Ray Liotta's hard-boiled cop ready to pop act is awfully trite by now and Anna Faris is once again playing up the overdone clueless blond stereotype from past movies that is rendered far worse here by the aforementioned horribly demeaning aspects in her character. Michael Peňa does extract precious few laughs with some exaggerated glances trying to look cool although not enough to move past being a comic caricature while John and Matt Yuan just seem to be there to be the token Asian twins as they are really given absolutely nothing to do except to be the butt of Rogen's silly line, “You are my infantry. If one of you dies, I still have another.” And what is a nice girl like the one played by Collette Wolfe doing in this movie? She seems transplanted from another movie that gives the mean-spirited protagonist some undeservedly sappy scenes where she inexplicably falls for him simply because he is the protagonist.
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