| KNOCKED UP |
 2007 - USADirector: Judd Apatow
- Reviewed by Vickie
Written and directed by Judd Apatow, without any of the sweetness or charm that his first film (The 40-Year-Old Virgin) possessed, the story centers around Ben Stone (Seth Rogen), a perpetual slacker who’d rather get high and hang with his Greek-chorus of equally directionless buddies (Jason Segel, Jay Baruchel, Jonah Hill and Martin Starr) than, you know, get a job or find a purpose in life or shave. They live together in a big, unkempt, rented house and they all look like they’d make for a disturbingly pungent group were you to ever encounter them in real life. A visit to a club brings Ben into the sphere of Alison Scott (Katherine Heigl), a newly promoted on-air reporter for the E! network, who’s enjoying a celebratory night out with her older sister, Debbie (Leslie Mann). Before long, Ben and Alison are totally hammered, grinding on the dance floor and, eventually, doing the nasty back at her place. The cruel light of day the morning after brings a sobering wake-up call for our heroine, who realizes—to her profound horror—that the guy she slept with the night before is a crude, occasionally offensive, boorish dud. Faster than you can say, “Holy crap, I did WHAT last night?!?!”, she promptly exits what’s become, for her, a nightmare scenario. Ben, meanwhile, is filled with post-coital bravado that he parades before his buddies. He scored a hot chick! Cool! Pass the bong... Cut to eight weeks later. Alison’s pregnant and mortified that the father of her baby is one Ben Stone. She tells him the news, and the film then hits “repeat” as, time and again for the duration of the pregnancy, Alison tearfully explains how she’s “not ready for this” while Ben maintains his slacker lifestyle with no real signs of changing. Somehow, he manages to convince her that he’s a decent, upstanding guy and they start dating. Picking out baby cribs. Falling in love, even. (What?!) Her sister and brother-in-law (Paul Rudd, one of the film’s saving graces) watch from the sidelines, their own rocky marriage serving as something of an instruction manual for the woefully mismatched parents-to-be. But a story about the foibles of impending parenthood, and the ramifications of same for a guy like Ben, should contain some degree of heart, right? Wrong. In this movie, puerile humor rules the roost and cheap jokes are embraced whenever they appear. (For anyone who disagrees, I point to the delivery scene. “Oh my god! A VAGINA?!?!”) My biggest problem with Knocked Up is the fact that, for the most part, Ben remains unlikable throughout much of the film. There’s no real transformation in him (not until the film’s final moments, anyway) which, by default, casts Alison in a seriously unflattering light. Is she really that desperate or needlessly tolerant that she’d put up with him and his asshatty behavior? Fall in love with him? And how is the audience supposed to root for a guy who has no interest in changing his misguided ways and just lucked into finding a girl too blind to notice? It’s almost as though he’s pulling some kind of fast one on her and we’re being asked to pat him on the back for his deception. Alison is supposed to be a smart, professional woman with an amazing job, but we’re meant to believe she’d overlook all of Ben’s flaws (and there are plenty) for the sake of paternity? WHY? The storytelling is clearly skewed to favor the boys in this movie. Ben and his pals are losers. Unequivocal, undeniable losers. Yet, they’re made to be the antiheroes here—sure, they have no money, no jobs, no showers, no lives, but they have each other! They’re best friends, loyal to the core and united in their slovenliness! Behavior that totally wouldn’t fly with any woman in the real world is passed off as haplessly charming here. I didn’t buy it. Apatow also lapses into self-indulgence a few times over the course of the film. Many of his cast members have worked, and riffed, together before, so despite an already beefy running time (honestly, a comedy that’s 130 minutes long is just too long), we’re stuck watching the boys sit around and ramble over and over again throughout the film. Much of it is just clever banter that does nothing to advance the plot, so perhaps some editing would have been in order. I mean, sure it’s fun to sit around with your buddies and shoot the shit about inconsequential things like how far into In the Cut Meg Ryan appears topless but, much in the same way that wedding videos are only ever interesting to the bride and groom, it doesn’t make compelling viewing for folks not in on the shared history. I was also put off by a lot of the language, which seemed to be vulgar for vulgarity’s sake. I don’t mean to sound like a septuagenarian school marm, but seriously. I felt like I was watching a bunch of high-schoolers trying to outdo each other where potty mouth was concerned. I get that, occasionally in the film, it’s intended to be shockingly offensive, but it just seemed like lazy, unimaginative writing. (I can already hear the refrain of fans of the film defending it with “But that’s the way guys TALK!” To that I say: whatever.) For all its faults, like Ben, this movie does have a few things working in its favor. Several of the supporting players—Rudd, Mann, SNL’s Kristen Wiig as a wildly jealous E! staffer and Harold Ramis as Ben’s easygoing dad—provide terrific comedic moments. For a while, the relationship between Ben and Alison looks like it’s evolving and the two share some nice scenes, and even the comedic riffing among the boys is entertaining when delivered in small doses. Knocked Up is clearly meant to entertain men between 18 and 25. I doubt that women will fall for it in the same way they did Virgin, mainly because Seth Rogen’s character isn’t nearly as endearing as Carell’s Andy Stitzer, and Heigl’s Alison isn’t half as cool or likable as Catherine Keener’s Trish. But, as far as low-brow humor goes, this one will nonetheless likely wind up a summertime smash. |
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Knocked Up is a surprisingly crass, way over-marketed movie
about an oafish loser with chauvinistic tendencies, who gets a pretty
girl pregnant after a drunken one-night stand and then remains an
oafish loser with chauvinistic tendencies for almost the entire film as
the mother of his child, completely inexplicably, starts to fall for
him. It’s a utopian fantasy for chauvinistic oafs and shiftless nerds
everywhere and, for that reason, I was rather disappointed in the whole
thing.
