I know that I'm way late to this particular party but now that I'm here... Well, now that I'm here, I feel a lot like Jay Baruchel arriving at James Franco's party in "This is the End." I've been told this is the place to be, and I see people I know, people I like and everyone looks like they're having such a great time, but... it's not doing much of anything for me.
Don't get me wrong. I chuckled at the chicken strutting across the marble floor in the morning-aftered luxury suite. I giggled when Bradley Cooper drove the stolen police car up the crowded sidewalk on the Strip. And I definitely laughed when, midway through the film, Ed Helms played the piano and improvised a song that summed up all the major plot points so far. Oh, and Zach Galifinakis' "I didn't know they gave out rings at the Holocaust," that caught me off guard and cracked me up. But for most of the movie, particularly the first half, I was just sitting there thinking "OK, something funny's going to happen any moment, right?"
After four years of hype, I was looking forward to this one. The set-up may not be the most original, but it's a good one. But then there was Ed Helms' impossibly awful ball-busting fiancee-to-be who just such a painful, stale cliche. Zach Galifinakis, who I'd thought would be dryly hilarious, was for most of the film just convincingly creepy and off-putting. Bradley Cooper was his ever-loveable self but doesn't carry much of the comedy. Heather Graham in her two brief scenes is sweet as pie. Ed Helms himself wasn't too great either (plot-summing-up song aside) and just spent too much of the time saying "I am so screwed!" or equivalent.
In fact, so much of the film really was just three dudes saying "I can't believe this!", "This is so fucked up!" or getting hit by someone or something. In the end I was just left wondering what a better Writer and Director could do with this set-up: What would Billy Wilder do? How funny would this be if Edgar Wright were behind the camera?
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