This Is the End

The funniest moment of This Is the End is when Michael Cera smacks Rihanna's ass. The boys had fun with this one. Laughing with them in their “real” presence at dick jokes and sincere critical self-reflection has potential to be cool entertainment, but it would need a more sophisticated screenplay. This seems slapped together spontaneously in one evening and revisited only on the set. Casting is not everything. The penis-demon in the climax and the final song are good. (2013-11-08)

In probably the first film since Tropic Thunder, this is a film whose creators I would believe even if they told me in a hackneyed way: “We all enjoyed filming it, a great bunch of people came together." Except for a few moments when the jokes were awkward, I actually had fun from beginning to end (and more and more towards the end); and look, Jonah Hill is responsible for one of the very best moments of This Is the End. (2021-01-30)

Mission accomplished. Rihanna shook her ass, Hermione smacked Rogen in the face with an axe, Hill tried an exorcism on his own body, and Craig Robinson scored the most iconic line ever uttered at the gates of heaven. The humour is inconsistent and often misses the mark, the script impresses more as a sequence of various parodies than as a crazy whole, and the gory scenes are overly self-indulgent and unnecessary, but as an American one-off crap, it maintains a very tolerable level. Moreover, the actors were beautifully cast, and their dimensionless honesty and spitting on their own characters shows that Hollywood stars are not just superheroes and charitable icons. Robert Downey should have been here, though :D 70% (2013-12-08)

This is the End is a comedy that is pulled from mediocrity by the actors playing themselves, a large number of parody and WTF scenes, but it is also marred by a number of silly and cheesy sequences that probably couldn't be avoided in a film like this. The best moments were a pretty funny parody of The Exorcist and a heavenly cameo by an unnamed band. In short, a film that satisfies as an average one-off and there is not the slightest need for anyone to ever see it again. (2014-11-14)

A really great premise which made a lot of actors finally look friendlier and more human to me, as they are basically playing themselves. Suddenly, however, there is a brutal apocalypse, which is a meaningless bullshit in all respects and the only thing keeping the movie afloat is a number of pretty brutal catchphrases of the individual actors, who put down and try to best each other. I like the fact that the actors were themselves and that several times they openly made fun of themselves. What I don’t like was that some jokes were pretty unnecessary and over the line. At times I laughed a lot, just to stop laughing afterwards and wait for another catchphrase that would make me happy again. Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg came up with a great idea and a lot of the actors convinced me that they are a great group of friends who can make you laugh and that I should definitely reckon with them for the future of America. (2014-09-27)