I always have the same experience with bombs: when I see them I always wonder why everyone hated the movie so much. This happened to me with Gigli, with John Carter, and with numerous other movies. I think hype, both positive and negative, feeds back on itself. And people get carried away.
This is not a terrible movie by any means. It is a moderately funny movie that also happens to be a fairly large missed opportunity.
To put it mildly Goldberg and Rogen are absolutely not Parker and Stone. But that doesn’t mean the film is terrible; I laughed plenty, particularly in the opening segments with the Eminem interview in particular. But I still laughed through much of the movie – not a ton and the laughs were easy – but I laughed.
The problem with the film isn’t that it’s incompetent, or that it’s not funny – the problem is that they sought to take on a subject rife for satire with anatomical humour, which doesn’t make a whole whack of sense when you remove yourself from it. Sure, some of those jokes worked, but they could have worked in any movie. That’s the problem.
The movie isn’t bad, just ill-conceived.
5/10
- Directed by Seth Rogen, Evan Goldberg
- Produced by Seth Rogen, Evan Goldberg, James Weaver
- Screenplay by Dan Sterling
- Story by Seth Rogen, Evan Goldberg, Dan Sterling
- Starring
- James Franco as Dave Skylark
- Seth Rogen as Aaron Rapaport
- Lizzy Caplan as Agent Lacey
- Randall Park as Kim Jong-un
- Diana Bang as Sook-yin Park
- Timothy Simons as Malcolm
- Reese Alexander as Agent Botwin
- Anders Holm as Jake
- Charles Rahi Chun as General Jong
- Cameos from
- Eminem,
- Rob Lowe,
- Bill Maher,
- Seth Meyers,
- Joseph Gordon-Levitt,
- Ben Schwartz,
- Brian Williams,
- Scott Pelley,
- Iggy Azalea,
- Nicki Minaj,
- Emma Stone,
- Zac Efron,
- and Guy Fieri.
- Music by Henry Jackman
- Cinematography by Brandon Trost
- Edited by Zene Baker, Evan Henke
- Production companies: Point Grey Pictures, LStar Capital
- Distributed by Columbia Pictures
- Release date: December 11, 2014
- Running time: 112 minutes
- Country: United States
- Language: English, Korean
- Budget: $44 million
- Box office: $12.3 million