This Is the End

I have to confess that I’ve been waiting to see this film for over six months now, and while I had heard from other friends that it wasn’t funny at all, I have to say that I certainly was not disappointed.

While the plot of This Is the End is centered around the biblical apocalypse, the main conflict of the film lies between Jay Baruchel and Seth Rogen. Jay flies out to Los Angeles and plans to say with Seth during his visit, and while Jay is hesitant to mingle with Seth’s Hollywood friends, Seth convinces him to attend a party at James Franco’s house. Irritated by the eccentricities and shallowness of Seth’s new friends, Jay makes an excuse to leave the party, and the two buds venture off to a convenient store to buy cigarettes and fend off Seth’s munchies. While on this excursion, the two are shaken by a series of strange events, flee back to Franco’s house, and the apocalypse begins to unfold.

For me, the main selling point of this film was definitely the cast, and I feel that, for the most part, I wasn’t disappointed by any of the ensemble cast’s performance. There always seems to be that risk of failure when too many big names are included in a film (think Movie 43, Valentine’s Day, and New Year’s Eve), but because most of these actors had already worked together on previous projects, if anything, having this comedy dream team for an ensemble cast only worked to enhance their performances because they were able to play off of one another.

I do admit that there were a few comedians I would’ve loved to have seen more of in this film because most of the actors featured in the numerous commericials for the movie were only shown in brief cameos at James Franco’s party, which was slightly disappointing. For example, Aziz Ansari’s only moment in the film is the part that’s been shown multiple times in commercials. I would have also liked for this film to have included a female lead, more specifically Mindy Kaling since she’s a brilliant female comedian and they used her name a lot in the marketing of the film. While I was disappointed that most of my favorite comics only had brief scenes, I felt like the strengths of the main cast helped to make up for the overload of cameos.

The only characters that I have to admit that I was a little bored by, maybe even to the point of being annoyed, were Seth Rogen and Jay Baruchel. While I can understand that because the film centers around their friendship, they are supposed to be the relatable, “normal” characters, it just felt out of place, particularly because the rest of the main cast were playing off of their own eccentricities and parodies of themselves so well. I adore Jay Baruchel and have enjoyed his work in every other film that I’ve seen him in, as well as his role in the series Undeclared, but his character just genuinely got on my nerves. While Franco, Hill, and McBride were all hilarious in their roles, I felt like the strongest character in the film was Craig Robinson. He did an amazing job walking the line between making himself relatable and still poking fun at himself, and I was surprised that he was my favorite because, while I loved him as Darrell on the US version of The Office, the last film he starred in was Tyler Perry’s Peeples, which didn’t look like it would be good at all.

Another aspect of the film that stood out to me was the concept. When it comes to apocalyptic films, the big trend is to focus on a zombie apocalypse, and I thought that this film was fresh in that it included a more biblical approach to the apocalypse. Also, while I went into this movie purely for the laughs, there were also some moments that got some genuine startles from both myself and the friend I went with, so everyone involved certainly did a great job of balancing both the horror elements and the comedic aspects of the film.

The only real downside for me with this film was that, even though I’m a fan of raunchy comedy, it went a little overboard at times with the more obscene comedy and the gore, but in my opinion, the comedy and the casts’ performances definitely made up for being a little grossed out at times. This is certainly not a movie I would suggest going to see with your family. Another thing that sort of bothered me were the amount of loose ends left at the end of the film. This would have been a great instance to incorporate an epilogue, but sadly, there was nothing.

Overall, I would definitely recommend seeing this film if you’re on-the-fence about it. There’s a reason why it’s been the number one comedy in America for the first two weeks since its release.