This is the End

This is the End (2013)

Predicted Rating: 2 Stars

Directed by: Seth Rogan and Evan Goldberg (Directorial Debut). Starring Seth Rogan (Pineapple Express), Jonah Hill (Superbad) and Jay Baruchel (She's Out of Your League)

During a party at James Franco's house that includes such celebrities as Christopher Mintz-Plasse, Michael Cera, Aziz Ansari, Emma Watson and Rihanna, the world unexpectedly ends causing most of the celebrities to be sucked into an abyss to hell. Remaining after the mayhem are Franco, Seth Rogen, Jay Baruchel, Craig Robinson and Jonah Hill. After deciding the best course of action is to remain inside Franco's house and ration out the food, including one very desirable Milky Way. When the group wakes up to finds that their supplies have been mostly consumed by an unaware Danny McBride, tensions build in the house.

Well, that was actually a pleasant surprise. The act of self parody is a very hard genre to pull off in cinema but it was done perfectly in This is the End. Most of the time movies that explore the self parody genre seem cocky. The lead actors usually act as if look at us, we are so famous we can play ourselves and the cameos are put in so the makers of the film can say look who we have got to appear and they are even playing themselves! This is the End is essentially the opposite. It makes proper fun of the actors playing themselves and it essentially feels like they are playing characters of themselves rather than themselves, if you catch my drift. A better way to put it would be that they are playing who they want to be rather than who they actually are. The other cameos are far from tacky either. This is probably due to how ridiculous they are. I mean come on, Michael Cera is surely not a sex crazed coke addict and I assume Emma Watson is the nicest person on the planet and would not hold you to ransom with an axe.

Once you get past the actors playing themselves, the story is very well written. The jokes are plentiful and don't dry up as the movie progresses, something that plagues many comedies. This is the film The Watch should have been. Rogen and Goldberg have written some good movies but also some very bad ones. I am going as far to say that it is the best Rogen/Goldberg movie since Superbad. It was also quite nostalgic to see the three main guys from Superbad chatting nicely then Michael Cera unexpectedly blow cocaine in Christopher Mintz-Plasse's face. This was definitely the funniest movie so far this year.

I am going to end with this (excuse the pun), the ending is one of the best in recent memory and will have people who grew up in the 90's frothing at the mouth

Final Rating: One of the funniest movies released over the last few years that manages to effectively nail the hard genre of self-parody. 4 stars