Superbad Review

Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg started writing this as teenagers and it shows in the best possible way, because the dialogue has the specific texture of how boys that age actually talk to each other, which is constantly, competitively and almost never about the thing that is bothering them. The plot is a night of errands. Underneath the errands is a breakup: two friends who have functioned as a single unit for a decade are about to leave for different colleges, and since neither can say that, they scream at each other about a forged identification card instead.

Jonah Hill plays panic as aggression, Michael Cera plays it as apology, and the two registers are so precisely matched that the last scene, on an escalator in a shopping mall, is genuinely painful to watch. The police subplot is the weakest strand and stops the film cold twice. Greg Mottola shoots it plainly, which is correct. What lifts this above every peer it launched is that the crudeness is never the point, only the armor the crudeness provides.