The best teen movie since American Pie

Rating: 8/10 (29 January 2008)

Having covered middle age and young adulthood with the wicked one-two punch of The 40 Year Old Virgin and Knocked Up, Hollywood's current reigning comedy overlord Judd Apatow turns his sight on teenagers. And although this isn't quite as good a film as his pregnancy misadventure, Superbad is more of the balls out laugh marathon that Knocked Up was billed as. Focusing on three teenage friends taking the long route to the graduation party, it is a very funny but also rather sad film that portrays eighteen year olds in a much more realistic way than usual. Producers/directors/writers take note; the average adolescent male doesn't give a toss about the prom, the big game or dating the geeky-but-hot girl, he just wants to get laid and is liable to do just about anything bar you know, talking to a girl to do so. Superbad knows this and while the overly familiar plot is hardly going to score points for originality, it certainly racks them up when it comes to the execution.
Granted, the few female characters are little more than sketches, but our central trio of Seth (Jonah Hill), Evan (Michael Cera) and Fogell (Christopher Mintz-Plasse) are brilliantly written and performed. Seth is rotund, foul-mouthed and aggressively insecure, Evan is quiet, vulnerable and the most level headed of the three while Fogell is so nerdy he'd even get kicked out of a Stargate convention. Every scene where they're together fizzles with chemistry, the lads bickering and trading some killer lines and it's very easy to believe that they've been friends since childhood. Not only that, but their insecurities are profoundly believable and their tendency to over-examine everything girls say to them makes them all likable leads.
It's therefore no surprise that Seth ropes them all into a plan to get in the girls good-books by using Fogell's newly acquired fake ID to purchase alcohol. All they have to do is go to the nearest convenience store, pick up a few bottles and then head back. Simple right? Well things get rapidly out of hand and soon the narrative splits in two, Fogell spending most of the evening with the two most unprofessional cops in America (Seth Rogen and Bill Hader) while Seth and Evan, believing that Fogell's been arrested, try to find alternative sources of booze. Several near disasters later and they find themselves at loggerheads which is where Superbad's real soul emerges. The overlying story may be about their relationship with girls, but it's really about the friendship between Seth and Evan. With college looming ever closer they know their days of raging hormones will soon be over and what's more, they'll be separated as they head off to different schools. Their break-up and inevitable make-up is incredibly touching in it's sincerity and should speak volumes to anyone who ever had to go to University and leave their best friend behind.
So Apatow once again knows how to do heart-breaking sentimentality but what about the comedy aspect? Well, after Knocked Up's intelligent relationship commentary, Superbad is a bit more low brow but man is it funny. The storyline fires out a rapid succession of smutty humour and is utterly remorseless in its assault, an early penis-drawing flashback being one especially gut churning highlight. It's a good thing too, you'll be crying with laughter so much that no-one will really notice if you start blubbing when the heart-wrenching ending rolls around.
In some respects this is the sort of film that Kevin Smith would make if he ever made a film about his adolescence, but with the added bonus of not having to put up with Jason Mewes for the entire thing. It has familiar cast members, an easily-relatable scenario and a script packed to the rafters with pop culture nods and foul mouthed humour, but lurking beneath it all is an honest paean to awkward outsiders in every secondary school. If you spent your teen years as captain of the football team, smoking behind bike sheds, banging the school bike and calling the kid wearing Metallica shirts things like "Mayor of Loserville," you should probably avoid this film. And go fist yourself. But for everyone who still looks back on secondary school with fond sentimentality and secretly wishing they could have brought a few more mates out with them, this is the best slice of Pie since the American one.