Teen Movies can be the crudest of things (think Porky’s), but they can also be the sweetest, capturing a confusing time truthfully and defining an era (think The Breakfast Club). Superbad manages to be both crude and sweet, as well as scream-out-loud funny. This is a must-see film for anyone who loves dick jokes and tales of friendship.
High School seniors Seth (Jonah Hill) and Evan (Michael Cerra) have been friends since forever, and they have one long summer ahead of them before they go off to different colleges. Realising that the end of year bash is their last opportunity to sleep with the girls from their year, they hatch a plan to impress their potential mates by buying booze for the party (illegally, this being America). The patsy in this cunning plan is their hanger-on Fogell, played by the wonderful newcomer Christopher Mintz-Plasse (imagine Dustin Diamond’s younger, weedier brother), who has just got a totally unconvincing fake ID. Their quest to get the girls of their dreams leads them to a crazy night of robberies, useless cops, beatings and nutcases.
It’s lovely to see Cerra (George Michael from the much-missed Arrested Development) transfer deservedly to the big screen, and Hill is definitely a star in the making. Like the performances, the joke writing here is excellent, with a plethora of quotable lines. What really seals the deal, however, are the characters, based on the writers themselves when they were teenagers; this explains why the friendship between brash, confident outsider Seth and quiet geek Evan rings so true. Superbad takes a bit of time to warm up and establish itself, but it settles in to become one of the funniest films of the year, as well as a worthy successor to the John Hughes classics of teen love and friendship.
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