CINEMA: Superbad

The box-office may have been with the big guns this year, in a sea of threequels and a web of over-blown theatrics but without doubt the Summer has belonged to the sleeper hit. The dying gasps of the season now bring us Superbad, a film from the same stable as the critically-acclaimed Knocked Up. University Students of the World, unite – for you now have another film to spoil for the rest of us. You’ll be quoting this one for a year at least.

The plot is basic teen-comedy fare. Meet Evan (Arrested Development’s Michael Cera) and Seth (Jonah Hill), two long-time buddies coming to the end of high school and looking forward with a degree of trepidation to college when they will go their separate ways. Completing their troika is Fogell, an awkward geek who Seth openly dislikes. As luck would have it, the hottest girl in the school is throwing a party and when Fogell announces he’s getting a fake ID, Seth volunteers the trio to procure alcohol for the social in the hope of securing the affections of the hottest babes who have ignored them for so long.

While Superbad has benefited from the excellent word-of-mouth afforded to Knocked Up, this is a worthy companion film that makes full use of its charismatic leads: a pitch-perfectly awkward Cera, the foul-mouthed Hill and a blissfully naïve Christopher Mintz-Plasse as Fogell, backed by an indulgently slick funk score – these guys are cool after all. Clocking in at a shade under two hours, the film moves along briskly enough and rarely threatens to betray its running time. Whenever things in the movie begin to crawl, up pop Bill Lander and co-writer Seth Rogan as a pair of renegade cops out to show one of our heroes how to mix it up on the streets and in doing so regaining the momentum.

With a script that manages to be both wonderfully coarse and acutely tender at the same time, this is a comedy with smarts over and above other entries in the pantheon. Besides playing around with the genre staples, Superbad sees fit to update the existing ones; thing is, the film does this so well, there doesn’t seem to be anywhere left for the teen-comedy to go except toward the lowest common denominator again. In that sense, Superbad is the final word on this kind of movie: pure popcorn entertainment for those who want to live vicariously one last time.