This Is the End Review

The gag could have been unbearable and it is not, because the film is genuinely willing to make its stars look small. Everyone plays a heightened, less flattering version of himself, and the comedy comes from vanity and cowardice rather than from name recognition. Danny McBride arrives as pure chaos and steals the picture outright. Michael Cera's brief turn as a monstrous version of his own image is the most quoted stretch of the year. Critics also note what nobody expected, which is that the effects are real: the sinkhole and the demons are staged with money and conviction, and the film is shot as an actual horror picture rather than a comedy with a monster in it.

The complaints are structural. Once the premise is established the film has nowhere to go but repetition, the middle stretch of confessions and rationing loses momentum, and the resolution reaches for a joke about salvation that plays as a shrug. The women in it barely exist. Still, the rate of laughs early on is high enough that most reviewers forgive the sag, and the willingness to be about actual friendship gives it a floor.