Gutless and Moronic and Intellectually Insulting

Rating: 1/10 (7 January 2008)

What would you do if you became pregnant by an oversexed bong-snorting gross pig of a human being after one drunken night of bar-hopping debauchery? Such is the question proposed in Judd Apatow's Knocked Up (2007) a mindlessly indoctrinating and strained, weak-premised regurgitation of that 'what if' and 'day after' scenario. The film is populated by thoughtless/clueless individuals who wouldn't be able to discover their own navels with two hands and a compass. This is a movie as primary and obvious in its effects as any clap-trap about twenty-somethings who should never become parents.
Apatow's screenplay bombards the audience with an endless line up of 'go for the crotch' jokes with the inevitable and largely predictable 'happy ending' tacked on for good measure. The script is not only simplistic in its one theme premise, but ultimately as much in bad taste as it left a bad taste with this critic. One vagina joke can be funny. Two is 'oh, please' and move the humor above the equator. After all, we're not all five years old and just discovered what our hoo-hoos and pee shooters can be used for.
However, after the tenth or eleventh kick in the nuts, Apatow's pedestrian screenplay simply degenerates into an anemic backdrop used to insert the word 'fuck' into every second or third line of otherwise boring dialogue and genuinely 'bad' writing. Advice to future script writers: if you can't make an audience laugh without employing obscenities then your lines are not funny to begin with and Knocked Up is about as unfunny as movies can get.
The story opens with attractive Alison Scott (Katherine Heigl), a reporter for E!, throwing caution  and the good sense God gave a lemon  into the wind when she decides to hook up with horn-dog off his leash, Ben Stone (Seth Rogen) inside a popular L.A. night spot. Aside: there's a reason why managers of nightclubs universally ascribe a design strategy of loud music and dim strobe lighting to their establishments: both  in conjunction with liquored libations dull and numb the senses. As the audience, we witness by how much Alison gets dulled down when the plot moves from a rather censored sex romp between she and Ben to an overly long close-up on Ben's exposed bottom the morning after.
From here, the plot is utterly pointless and predictable  especially given the film's obvious title. Alison discovers she's pregnant, decides to tell Ben, have the baby and hope for the best. Of course, nothing proves quite as easy as the first night's indiscretion. Ben, a druggy dropout with no future and no hope of one, isn't father material. He's just a sperm donor with a potty-mouth and devil-may-care attitude about everything.
Yet the film cannot even be honest about his character. Anyone smoking as much pot as Ben does would hardly be able to rattle off his own name, much less provide the uninterrupted angry litany of 'crotch' humor that philosophizes procreation into pornographic terminology - as raw, unfunny and unappealing as his own butt crack.
Obscenity in general is not a spruce up or supplement to quality writing. Clearly, Apatow's screenplay has no other purpose than to shock and repulse its audience with angry gross out humor, and such a shame too, since in the final analysis Knocked Up does not even fulfill that basic function - having overplayed its hand in the first five minutes. Lest we forget, that funny and crude do not go hand in glove - and implied comments are always more memorable than obvious ones.
Therefore, Knocked Up gets an 'F' in this critic's not so humble opinion - a lettered signifier that does not stand for 'fantastic' or that other aforementioned 'F-word' popularized to death in the script. Herein, the 'F' stands for 'flat.' This movie is a Frisbee. Toss it with the trash because that's exactly where it belongs! After seeing it once I hope never to see it again. I am trying to forget it now.