The movie, to be fair, does have brief flashes of depth when Hill and Cera are able to convincingly project the timidity that teenagers often have before they make the next big step into college and adulthood and the kind of male bonding that is mocked and dismissed by other classmates as homoerotic. Seth, who is curly, chubby and lacking in self-confidence, and Evan, who always looks insecure and anxious, have been close friends ever since grade school and they had vowed to go to college together, until the latter got into Dartmouth and the former did not. And the way the movie has the two of them declaring their immutable friendship by repeatedly saying “I love you” to each other is simultaneously liberating and funny.
There are a few other laughs that the film scores when it does not resort to outright bawdy jokes, particularly in Seth and Evan’s sidekick, Fogell (Christopher Mintz-Plasse, in his first starring role), who reminded me a little bit of the geeky nerd Eugene from Grease. He offers to be Seth and Evan’s ticket to illegally purchasing alcohol, though they are a little shaky about the idea because all Fogell has is a fake ID that identifies him as a 25-year old Hawaiian organ donor named McLovin. The way that Fogell tries to act so cool and hip about it and Cera’s po-faced reaction to the one-word name saying, “One name? Who are you, Seal?” are both priceless.
But even the talents of Mintz-Plasse get squandered once the story puts him together with two cops, Officer Slater (Bill Hader) and Officer Michaels (Rogen again), who feel like characters out of bad SNL skits. They capture him during a stick-up gone wrong and, for some reason, drag him around to engage in a lot of corrupt behavior and spin the police car around and around without registering a single laugh. It all goes downhill to a revelation of the rationale for the behavior that's a shamelessly sappy attempt to hint that the crude teenage years were the best times for them, which seems to show that the filmmakers may have not grown up that much after all.
Article comments
1 - Matt Paprocki
"Yes, the defenders of Superbad will say that I am being a prude"
Ding. Ding. Anytime you bring up uneasiness in a raunchy comedy is the sign you're being uncomfortable with the material.
"I somehow doubt that adolescent yearning alone would automatically turn them into extreme potty mouths like the screenwriters’ teenage alter-egos here"
It happens. Daily. Not sure when you went to high school, but I can assure in the late 90's, this is exactly what I experienced. It's almost too perfect, and the on-screen exploits, minus the cops, are eerily real to many. And obviously, if this is their alter-egos, then this happened to them as well.
Are all teenagers like this? Of course not. The movie focuses on the select few who have a single purpose in life during their teenage years.
"who are not even polite enough to just point out a woman as “hot” or stop at one four-letter word instead of 20 or 100."
I'm baffled as yo why you're looking for politeness about women in a movie like this. Seriously? This just amps up the "prude" remark. It's a raunchy teenage comedy. Is Porky's not entertaining because woman aren't spoken of highly?
2 - Phillip Winn
I thought Knocked Up was a far better film than Superbad, for many reasons, but I personally know kids exactly like the two potty-mouthed characters in this movie. Maybe not quite as funny, but just as foul and short-sighted and with the same stupid and self-defeating ideas about women.
Rather than getting into a rant about what a dangerous cycle it is that boys that age view women so poorly, and the the girls in turn hear that about themselves and tolerate it, leading to reinforcement, I'll just say that it's pretty typical.
Pretty funny movie overall, and the idea of the two leads finally separating after a life spent together was really the backbone of the movie. The movie literally ends with the two characters looking at each other as they get further apart, rather than at the girls walking next to each of them. That's a nice moment.
3 - John
I don't mind raunch, as I thoroughly enjoyed past comedies like "Animal House" and "There's Something About Mary," though I do feel that "Porky's" is quite lame. But compare the dialogue in this movie to even the guys in the much more recent "American Pie," which had a similar premise in the early 90's. The guys in that movie were not as redundantly vulgar in their speech as in "Superbad." The fact that Seth uses some 20 "f" words in one scene instead of one makes the humor repetitive and deflated. It's just not funny when you repeat a profane remark over and over again.
The fact that "Superbad" just captures the select few who are really, really profane kind of makes whatever heart it tries to capture quite sappy at the end because we don't believe that these teenagers will learn that much about women in the span of one night. I appreciate the life lessons the movie wants to offer but I just don't want the movie to have it both ways.
4 - John
To give more credit to Judd Apatow, I think "The 40-Year-Old Virgin" is one of the best of recent sex comedies because that movie actually did find the right balance between raunchy humor and heart, largely due to Steve Carell's protagonist hilariously react aversely to the rude antics his friends put him through.
5 - KDR
This one's for John:
For the record - American Pie was not EARLY 90s (think Arsenio Hall, 90210). It was filmed in 1999.
That'd be late 90s/turn of the century. Two totally different eras and experiences for high school students. Anyway, it's just a bit irritating that some people have no concept of chronological order in life!!
6 - John
You are right, my apologies, I meant to say "earlier in the 90s."