Super-sad

Rating: 1/10 (24 December 2007)

I adore gross-out teen comedy flicks. The last 30 years have brought film-goers real classics out of films you may have never thought would be -- and a few duds that tried to bounce off of the others alleging to be instant classics. Superbad falls into the latter category.
Superbad will become one of those films to those who looked at it today will look back years from now and say, "Why did I ever laugh at that?". The classic teen films were funny then, and are still funny now - that's the difference. Superbad is super-sad, disappointing, dull, lifeless and not very funny or gross. But it is a wanna-be for other wanna-bes.
I find the reasoning behind this film to an interest is to have liked the short lived TV program called "Freaks and Geeks". I didn't like it, and applauded when it was taken off the air. But it seems as though Judd Apatow has a way of drudging up elements of the failed show and creating the most horrible let down of films that ever were - hence Superbad.
There isn't one character in this film that didn't annoy the heck out of me. Especially the leads. Very annoying. The girls and the boys. Not because the leads were two testosterone-laden geeky friends were trying to fit in, get laid and get booze for a party they never would have been invited to in the first place - I mean that alone is a teen-angst comedy waiting to happen. But these teens were retreads upon retreads of other raunchy and drop-dead hilarious teen-angst films who have done the same set up 1000 times better, with more 'pop'..and interest than this. There is more to raunchy than just saying the "dirty-sexual" words millions of times and 'tee-heeing, nudge-nudge' behind it, or having the a-typical overweight, pseudo-sexual-knowledgeable-punching bag buddy slob over without a context, or the ways the leads tries to buy the liquor (an old set up in itself) - for a bunch of dead-pan female teens you wouldn't care about in the first place - I could go on, but urgh!!! What made the other grossed out teen comedies work is that you COULD identify with one or more characters and those characters were radically different from each other. Here, they were all the same. No difference in any of them whatsoever. That's what made them boring as all get-up. Who cares what these boys did, how they did it -- ? Yawn!
For every teen, there is a film that gets next to them and touches what they're going through. If this is for teens today, I now understand the successes of a 'Brittney', a 'Beyonce', a 'Hillary', a 'Lindsay', a 'Kardasian', a 'Paris' et al, etc. Mindless, copycat, two seconds of interest in a 24 hour day dredge. For the other teens, I'm sure they may (grudgingly) agree that the original 'American Pie' is still the film to beat. Superbad is at the bottom, under the pile of dirty laundry.