This Is The End

Synopsis: James Franco is hosting a Hollywood house-warming party and a bunch of his mates including Seth Rogen, Jay Baruchel and Jonah Hill turn up. Then the Apocalypse occurs.  

This Is The End is a comedy for audiences who enjoy slacker comedies. In fact that is its express market as it assembles a frat party of well-known actors from movies such as Superbad and Pineapple Express (both of which were written by the co-writers and directors of this film, Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg) and get them to play themselves, or at least their screen personae, in a wacky scenario in which they are trapped in James Franco’s upscale Hollywood house while the world as they know it comes to an end.

Whilst there is an appeal in the over-arching self-parodying by a gaggle of well-known screen personalities, by and large the humour is of the familiar blokily homo-erotic (the sole female is Emma Watson who appears in a gag about her being raped by the guys) and hyperbolically gross-out stripe. And unless you are mad keen on this kind of stuff it’s only intermittently funny: Michael Cera as a cokehead, an ad hoc sequel to Pineapple Express and a scene in which Franco and Danny McBride frantically argue about the latter’s masturbatory activities stood out for me.

This Is The End is almost worth going to see on the big screen as there are enough laughs and the CGI Apocalypse is well enough done but if you're planning to, don’t get your hopes too high.

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