Superbad

Writers Seth Rogen (producer of The 40-Year-Old Virgin) and Evan Goldberg (executive producer for Knocked Up) deliver a romantic comedy that follows the standard formula: two people deeply in love face a crisis, get on each others' nerves, fight, break up, make up, and all of this happens during a big adventure. The twist? Our star-crossed pair are two (nominally heterosexual) high school boys facing impending adulthood. In other words, Superbad is a slightly above-average teen romp with all the fixins: booze, broads, and a sagging second act.

The first third of the movie plays like a cross between Tarantino and John Hughes, powered by rapid-fire, filthy, funny dialogue about websites with names like "The Vagtastic Voyage" and the joys of handjobs, blowjobs, and any other sort of job that doesn't refer to gainful employment.

And why should it? The two best buds at the heart of the flick are high schoolers Seth (Johan Hill) and Evan (Michael Cera)(yes, the writers named the characters after themselves). Behind their big talk and superficial bravado, the boys are in turmoil: college looms, and with it a fork in the road they've traveled together since grade school. Evan is headed to the Ivy League; Seth will be lucky to get into community college.

As the two bumble around the halls of their high school by day, they plot the evening's festivities. Their goals are simple and their strategy a classic: they want to get laid. In order to do so, they have to prove their manliness by providing liquor for the party that the school's gorgeous girls are throwing. To get the liquor, they need fake IDs, and for the fake IDs they turn to Fogell (Christopher Mintz-Plasse), a snuffling, uncool kid who doesn't seem to realize that he's not only no more awkward than Seth and Evan, but probably smarter than they are; why else would he try so hard to hang out with them?

In fact, Fogell's so smart that he, too, is bound to the same top college as Evan, and though they keep it from Seth, the two plan to room together.

As far as movies about innocent, intense adolescent love between young men goes, the movie's introductory scenes are just about perfect; we get that Seth and Evan stick together not just because they're part of the Out Crowd, but also because they genuinely understand and dig each other. Even Seth's embarrassing secret from second grade (unbelievably crude and unbelievably hilarious) can't drive them apart; understandably, they worry about what growing up will do to their bond. Hill and Cera both bring a sweetly sympathetic dimension to their young characters, and Mintz-Plasse, who was still in high school when he auditioned for the part on a lark, is a find as the smart but clueless Fogell.

But this is a teen romp of a movie, so the action has to be pressed into extremes in the name of hormones and laughs. The boys spend the middle third of the movie in a jumble of escalating horrors, which would be fine if the situations they stumble into didn't feel so half-baked and gratuitous. Fogell ends up in the custody of two renegade cops, officers Slater (Bill Hader) and Michaels (Rogen), and only Rogen's smart performance as a dumb frat-boy in a police uniform saves these scenes from total disaster.

Meantime, Seth and Evan tumble into the clutches of a highly questionable stranger who takes them to a party inhabited by an even more highly questionable crowd. In real life, of course, the boys would never be seen again, except for their pictures on milk cartons; in this movie, they come to an almost equally horrific pass, in a face-to-scowling-face confrontation with Kevin Corrigan, who plays Mark, the psychotic host of the party. (Anything sets Mark off: friends using his phone, his girlfriend's menstrual blood spotting some other guy's trousers... yep, the boys have somehow ended up in that kind of neighborhood.)

By the time the boys reunite and find their way to the party, their evening (and ours) already seems so strange that the drunken antics that follow almost seem logical in that they lead, not to instantly-regretted drunken sex (which was, after all, the original game plan), but to lessons in respect for women and confessions of the tender feelings that lurk beneath their horny, crude exteriors. (Well, maybe not Fogell's snuffled gloat of, "I've got a boner!" but the movie never wants to veer too far from its genre.)

It's only during the last few seconds that the movie finds its true emotional center; anyone who has ever been gay (or even straight) and an adolescent will remember the mix of platonic affection and the hint of something else that Hill packs into one last, meaningful glance. That parting shot is almost enough to make you forgive all the movie's dumb excesses and patience-eroding forays into impossible idiocy.