No minivan-drivin’ soccer moms here

Like In Seach of a Midnight Kiss, the holiday season fuels desperate action in Frozen River as well. It’s nearly Christmas in Massena, N.Y., a working-class town that borders Canada on the St. Lawrence River and includes a Mohawk reservation. Ray (Melissa Leo) has been saving for a down payment on a double-wide, which arrives as scheduled—only Ray’s husband, an addict and gambler, made off with the cash the day before.

Her 5-year-old, Ricky (James Reilly), tearily runs after the truck as it takes their new home away. Her 15-year-old son, T.J. (Charlie McDermott), pissily reiterates his offer to start working and asks if Ray is even going to bother looking for his dad.

She’s at least going to look for his car, which is where she stashed the money. Ray finds it, but not him, at the reservation’s bingo hall, and when she sees a Mohawk woman, Lila (Misty Upham), get into the car and drive away, she follows her to her trailer.

Lila laughs at Ray’s threats to call the cops, saying they have no jurisdiction on the self-governing res. But she tells Ray that she knows a guy who’ll buy the car, who’s always looking for vehicles with pop-open trunks. Warily, Ray lets Lila direct her across the iced-over St. Lawrence: “This is so fucking stupid,” she says, but the lure of a couple thousand bucks trumps her fear.

The potential buyer doesn’t take the car off Ray’s hands but does shove some money into them, along with a couple of illegal immigrants who are ushered to the trunk. Across the border, they get more cash and unload their haul. Lila reassures Ray that it’s not a crime because the “trade” is between Mohawk lands.

Then she says something more believable: “They’re not going to stop you; you’re white.” Each trip means a relatively easy $1,250, more than her dollar-store job probably pays her a month.

Writer-director Courtney Hunt’s debut is starkly photographed and quietly taut, avoiding sentiment or sensationalism in favor of an engrossing story. Some of its themes are familiar—poverty, racism, single mothers desperate to support their families—but Frozen River’s focus on two female protagonists, both unflinchingly flawed and human, is rare and refreshing.

Besides the obliviously optimistic Ricky, who wraps Christmas lights around himself and waits for Santa to come, no character is all good or all bad. Ray always shows up for work and pushes for a promotion, and though she feeds her kids popcorn and Tang for breakfast, she does feed them.

Lila has a year-old son that the tribal council took away from her after her smuggler husband died; she sits in a tree outside her mother-in-law’s to watch her child and smuggles herself so she can leave money outside their door.

Even T.J. is no saint: His “classmate” offering a job is actually a guy for whom T.J. steals credit-card numbers. Still, it allows him to buy his little brother a Christmas present when Mom’s too busy breaking the law to get to Kmart in time.

Leo and Upham give terrifically nuanced performances with characters who are prickly at their sunniest, both bossy and mistrustful of other races. (When Ray is asked to drive two “Pakis,” she says she’s never even heard of Pakistan and hopes “they’re not the ones who blow themselves and everyone else up.”)

But their drive and resolve, especially when things go wrong, are too admirable to dismiss them as cold opportunists. And, of course, there’s the love they show their kids. You shouldn’t want to cheer when a criminal uses dirty money to save the family flat-screen from the repo man just in time, but Frozen River hooks you into imagining that Ray’s struggles could be your own.

What We Do Is…not even worth a rental

There are several moments during What We Do Is Secret, a biopic about the Germs, when you can imagine Walk Hard’s Dewey Cox wailing, “This is a dark fucking period!” But the latter’s lamentation was intended as parody, whereas writer-director Rodger Grossman’s 15-year labor of love is—or, at least, is supposed to be—quite serious.

Grossman’s long-gestating portrait of the short-lived ’70s punk band, which was barred from playing Los Angeles clubs by the time it got around to recording an album, focuses on Darby Crash (Shane West), the now-textbook head case/“genius” who founded and disastrously fronted a band whose members couldn’t play their instruments. Crash, born Jan Paul Beahm, had a five-year plan to achieve infamy, ending with his 1980 suicide, and he regarded actual music as secondary to blowhardiness.

Still, he was together enough to assemble a band: His guitarist and bass player were rechristened Pat Smear (Rick Gonzalez) and Lorna Doom (Bijou Phillips), respectively; Belinda Carlisle, briefly part of the lineup as drummer Dottie Danger, would eventually be replaced by Don Bolles (Noah Segan). They did eventually learn to play and in fact became pioneers in Los Angeles’ hardcore scene, even while Crash’s heroin use ensured that their shows were more spectacle than concert.

What We Do Is Secret, named after a Germs song, begins with one genuine moment—West perfectly imitating Crash’s baby-talkish onstage requests for a “beerwa”—but crumbles into cartoonish movie-of-the-week territory from there. While West makes a great shambles of a singer (so much so that the remaining band members have toured with him) and Phillips doesn’t embarrass herself, the others aren’t done any favors by Grossman’s awkward script and cheesy direction: Gee-golly flashbacks to the group’s early days has Gonzalez playing future Nirvana and Foo Fighters member Smear like he’s channeling Welcome Back, Kotter’s Juan Epstein, Segan’s decked in terrible wigs, and Ashton Holmes, as Crash hanger-on/implied love interest Rob Henley, whines “I don’t want to be a junkie, Darby!” before his first smack injection. (Combined with his overdone acne makeup, Holmes is practically The Simpsons’ Squeaky-Voiced Teen .)

The film’s only watchable scenes are the musical performances, which are always chaotic, frequently mesmerizing, and come closest to reflecting punk’s grimy rawness. The rest is High School Musical with needles and dye jobs.

Pretty much a one-joke concept, but it actually gets funnier as it goes on. Or maybe it just makes me happy to know I wasn’t the only one who found Bale’s voice ridiculous:

Who put my sticks in the vending machine?

At nearly every moment of The Rocker, a comedy about a hair-metal drummer who got kicked out of his band about a minute before they made it big, you’ll be reminded of something else. Spinal Tap. The Darkness. School of Rock. Jack Black. Musical types, obviously, will also recognize themselves, feeling Robert “Fish” Fishman’s pain and desire to rock.

Yet anyone who’s had any ambition beyond sitting in a cubicle will warm to his story, too, particularly during a scene in which he’s interviewing to become an office drone and explaining that the gap in his résumé reflects his failed attempt at a dream. “And now I’m ready to work here until I die,” Fish says.

Hitting you in the goals is just one way The Rocker rises above its broad-strokes redundancy; the people at its wheel are another. It’s directed by The Full Monty’s Peter Cattaneo—who accessorizes more heavily with slapstick but still makes most of it sublime—and scripted by Wally Wolodarsky and Maya Forbes, former writers for The Simpsons and The Larry Sanders Show, respectively.

Of course, there’s also Fish himself: Rainn Wilson, whose resemblance to Black as he mugs and sweats and spills out of his clothes is initially hard to get past. But Wilson soon settles into his own groove, both separating his character from Dewey Finn and, more crucial, keeping Dwight Schrute confined to The Office.

The Rocker’s opening shows Vesuvius, Fish’s former band, in its heyday: 1986. Combine that year with Vesuvius’ play-metal repertoire, and you’ve got a slow-moving target. Will Arnett, Fred Armisen, and Ed Helms help supply the musical cheese; the group’s manager has a cell phone the size of a Merlin.

Vesuvius is offered a record deal, but only if they replace Fish with someone more marketable. They crow about loyalty until the true carrot is dangled: The band would also go on tour with Whitesnake. So, Fish is history, though he gives pretty impressive chase as the other members hightail it in their crappy van; he sprints like Superman to catch the vehicle, piercing the van’s roof with his drumsticks, and even re-animates, zombielike, after they run him over.

Fast-forward 20 years, and Fish is a telemarketer who’s about to get fired for going batshit on a fellow employee. (The new Vesuvius record is out, and dude can’t stop talking about it.) Fish takes the bus home to his girlfriend (Jane Krakowski), who doesn’t get far into a we-need-to-talk speech before he exclaims, “I break up with you!” Now homeless and unemployed, Fish moves in with his hyperresponsible sister, Lisa (Jane Lynch) and her more sympathetic/arrested husband, Stan (Jeff Garlin).

Lisa and Stan’s teenage son, Matt (Josh Gad), is in a band called A.D.D. And though Fish has vowed never to play music again, when A.D.D.’s drummer quits the group right before prom, well, Fish needs only to hear a few seconds of a drum machine to start unpacking the spandex. (When someone protests that lots of bands use computerized beats, Fish responds, “Lots of elevators play Celine Dion—that don’t make it right.”)

Fish’s prom debut with Matt, guitarist Amelia (Superbad’s Emma Stone), and Jonas-like lead singer Curtis (real soft-rocker Teddy Geiger) is first triumphant but ultimately terrible as he turns “In Your Eyes” into a frenzied-tempo monstrosity.

Luckily, there’s YouTube: When A.D.D. decides to give Fish another chance but are forbidden from practicing together, Matt rigs Webcams in each of their homes. Not familiar with the technology, Fish thinks it’s merely a mic and proceeds to literally rock out with his cock out. Screw treadmills; A.D.D. has the “Naked Drummer,” and it’s viral gold.

The Rocker has its share of the expected late-summer-comedy pitfalls: gross humor, knocks to the head, paint-by-numbers conflict, resolution, and romance, and, worst of all, a few dead spots when the main joke of a 40-year-old partying with a bunch of teens gets old. Its 102 minutes feels a little long—and the music, which is pretty generic, is partly to blame.

But the film gets an emotional boost from its blue-collar milieu (it’s set and partially shot in Cleveland) that italicizes the script’s get-outta-Dodge feel. Stone, Geiger, and Gad are great straightmen to Wilson’s cartoon character; each of them are likable and inherently relatable as they deal with their individual issues, mostly involving self-doubt. (As for the puppy-eyed Geiger, well, he’s got a record deal for a reason.)

What really makes The Rocker work, though, is that its tone has as wide an appeal as its follow-your-dream message: When the humor doesn’t involve sweaty armpits or vomit, it’s alternately dry, silly, and profane—Christina Applegate, as Curtis’ hot mom, gets some good one-liners, as does Saturday Night Live’s Jason Sudeikis as A.D.D.’s odd manager. It’s a mixed bag that’s appropriate for older kids but still works for grown-ups, and it will certainly serve as a nice antidote to viewers maxed out on Apatow blue.

Too sexy for a robe

Hamlet 2 , like The Rocker, also treads familiar territory, but it’ll only remind you of how the material has been more successfully executed before. One trailer boasts that its musical-within-a-movie is “so offensive, so profane, so stupid,” which is, well, so wrong.

Never mind that Christopher Guest used a similar storyline—bad director puts on worse play—in the far wittier Waiting for Guffman. More egregious is that this came from co-writer Pam Brady, who wrote both the snort-inducing South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut and the lesser but still worthy Team America: World Police.

Maybe writer-director Andrew Fleming, best known for 1999’s Dick, held her back. Regardless, Hamlet 2’s laughs and inventiveness are as spotty as the ability of roller-skating drama teacher Dana Marschz (Steve Coogan) to recognize brilliance. Dana’s Arizona high school is canceling its theater program, and he—an admittedly failed actor—is determined to come up with a work dazzling enough to save it.

Dana considers a musical adaptation of The Lake House — I’ll pause here to let the sublime ludicrousness of that light bulb sink in — but then settles on an even lower circle of hell: a sequel to Hamlet. “The Deuce,” he nicknames it. “Doesn’t everyone die at the end of the first one?” Dana’s wife (an unappealingly bitter Catherine Keener) asks. “I’ve got a device,” he responds. That would be a time machine, which, among other things, allows Hamlet to hang with Jesus Christ.

One aspect of Hamlet 2 (the movie) does live up to Brady’s previous accomplishments: The music is a knockout. “Rock Me Sexy Jesus” is as catchy as anything in Bye Bye Birdie, and ballads such as “Raped in the Face” bring nearly as many giggles in a couple of minutes as the entire remainder of the film.

It was also a smart move to have Coogan play Jesus, rocking Broadway choreography in long hair, a wife-beater, and jeans. He’s consistently the best part of the film, alternately giddy, delusional, and self-loathing as someone who reveres the dramatic arts but doesn’t necessarily have the same standards that other theater-lovers do. (Dana recruits, for example, the Tucson’s Gay Men’s Chorus to sing “Maniac” in the show.)

Dana’s mostly Latino class, which eventually has to meet in the gym — during volleyball practice — hardly registers, though there’s a funny bit in which Dana visits with the disapproving parents of his star, Octavio (Joseph Julian Soria). Dana expects that they object to their son’s participation because of “cultural narrow-mindedness” but finds they’re more sophisticated and literary than Dana could ever hope to be.

Dana’s ignorance is the bulk of his charm, especially when he’s aware of it—“I’m such a dick!” he exclaims when he gets his skate caught in a crevice. And when he accidentally clocks a student with a garbage can and someone points out how stupid it was, he responds with a bright face, “It was stupid, but it was also theater!” One small tweak, and Hamlet 2 has a new tagline.

Nope, no metaphor here.

An ingenue, a diva, a chucklehead, and a seemingly regular guy who turns out to be a chucklehead go into the woods to write a movie for their struggling-actor selves. It sounds like the setup for a bad joke, but really it’s premise of Baghead, the second feature from mumblecore auteurs Jay and Mark Duplass (The Puffy Chair).

The difference? About 83 minutes. Baghead isn’t a terrible movie, exactly, and actually starts out promisingly: The four main characters are watching a godawful film at an indie festival, alternately grimacing, laughing, and having the inevitable we-could-do-better-than-that thoughts. Turns out the director is an acquaintance of Matt’s (Ross Partridge), so he does some ass-kissing to try and score access to the screening’s afterparty. (”Did you just say his film was awesome?” chucklehead Chad (Steve Zissis) later asks with a nauseated look.)

They don’t get into the party, so instead decide to hole up at a family member’s cabin for the weekend to create their own script. Because the foursome comprise two sorta-couples – Matt and the arrogant Catherine (Elise Muller) have been on and off for 11 years, while Chad is trying to move beyond the friend zone with dippy Michelle (Greta Gerwig) – they’d like to write a romance. But when Michelle dreams about a guy stalking them with a bag on his head, a thriller takes shape – and then goes meta, when they realize the vision might not have just been a dream after all.

Compared to films such as Tropic Thunder and The Blair Witch Project, Baghead’s poke at the film industry and attempt at verite horror are a little like making vroom-vroom noises next to a Porsche. The Duplass’s main offense is their characters, who despite being well into their 30s (with the possible exception of Michelle) act like brats, playing nasty tricks on each other and doing a lot of pouting when things don’t go their way. (Puffy Chair’s peeps weren’t always likable, but they were realistic – and in a superior movie.)

Also throw-your-Skittles irritating is the directors’ camerawork, which is wobbly with frequent focus adjustments and sudden zooms. There are a couple of decent scares here, and the sexual tension between the four sometimes feels believable, if unequivocally 10th-grade-ish. With digital cameras getting cheaper and film festivals reproducing like mosquitoes, Baghead isn’t likely to mark the end of the lo-fi movement. But it’s a good argument against hailing amateur as the new pro.

Jungle fever

Tropic Thunder may have first appeared on your radar last August, when Owen Wilson dropped out of filming after his suicide attempt. Or maybe you heard about it earlier this year, when word got out that Robert Downey Jr., in the film’s movie-within-a-movie, would be playing a black character.

But the premise for this Hollywood-skewering war spoof has reportedly been roller-derbying around writer-director Ben Stiller’s brain since 1987. That’s 21 years spent marinating in the comedian’s twisted psyche, eventually co-molded by scripters Justin Theroux and Etan Cohen and, certainly, further shaped by an A-list cast that includes Jack Black, Nick Nolte, Steve Coogan, and Danny McBride.

The result? A comedy beast that’s nearly impossible to dissect. At least not without giving up the goods, anyway. Whereas the details about Downey’s racial transformation, for example – his character, Kirk Lazarus, is actually an Australian actor so celebrated and Method he’s hired to portray an African-American soldier in a Vietnam flick – might have comprised 75 percent of the gag in lesser hands, here the concept is a mere launching point for a performance so brilliant, it’s fair to regard Lazaurs as August’s Joker. Another not-so-secret cameo may help rinse the ick off a superstar’s recently tarred reputation. (Though, in my opinion, not quite.)

There are fake trailers, surprise violence, layers upon layers of film-industry mockery, and rampant offensiveness that’s attracted cries for boycotts from more than one activist group. You can hear Stiller’s diligence to his vision in the dialogue: “More stupid!” demands a villain who takes the director’s character, Tugg Speedman, hostage and orders him to re-create one of his broad critical flops. He complies, delivering this nugget as a mentally challenged man talking about bad dreams: “This head movie makes mah eyes rain!” Earlier, Lazarus discusses craft with Speedman, declaring that his commitment to the aforementioned part must have left him feeling “moronical.”

The thing about moronicality is that it takes loads of intelligence to get it right, and in this regard Tropic Thunder can sidle up to classics from Some Like It Hot to The Jerk. For all its comedic density, the plot is simple: A memoir by Four Leaf Tayback (Nolte), Vietnam’s Pvt. Ryan, is being adapted to the big screen by clueless British director Damien Cockburn (Coogan). He can’t control his cast, which besides Lazarus and action-hero Speedman includes rapper-turned-actor Alpa Chino (Brandon T. Jackson), drug-addled star of Eddie Murphy-esque franchise The Fatties, Jeff Portnoy (Black), and still-level-headed newcomer, Kevin Sandusky (Jay Baruchel).

Tayback suggests that Cockburn “take them off the grid” to scare the artistes out of his actors and elicit more believable performances. But Cockburn’s orchestrated dumping of his cast into the jungle for a guerrilla shoot goes immediately wrong, and soon well-armored poppy farmers assume the actors are DEA agents. The thespians’ survival skills kick in – eventually – as they try to fight their way back to the world of gift bags and Booty Sweat (Chino’s energy drink).

Unlike last week’s Pineapple Express, Tropic Thunder’s blood-and-guts angle is introduced early and graphically, so its combination of action and yucks never feels disingenuous. All of the big players have ace moments – even Matthew McConaughey,who took over Wilson’s part as Speedman’s agent – but Stiller and Downey steal it: Stiller’s Speedman is a superior Derek Zoolander, hilarious whether he’s wriggling his body while dramatically taking bullets or quietly going nuts in captivity.

And it’s all of 30 seconds before Downey kills, in this case in his character’s trailer, without even uttering a word: Dressed as a monk – and still white – his expression during the preview’s narration is a dead-on imitation of every pretentious performance ever captured onscreen. As far as his guttural delivery and mannerisms when “black,” it’s too thorough, ridiculous, and well-plotted to be offensive (and Chino calls Lazarus on it repeatedly for good measure).

Speedman’s “Simple Jim” character – with buck teeth and a peroxide Prince Valiant cut — isn’t as excusable. But the script’s ingenious argument of the drawbacks of an actor “going full retard” — as well as the movie overall – will make your eyes rain.

I can’t be sure, but I think he’s contemplating something.

While his frequent collaborators played in the jungle, the usually comic Luke Wilson went down to the river in Henry Poole Is Here, a heavy-handed film about a fatally ill atheist who has faith forced upon him. It’s forced upon the audience, too, in a debut script by Albert Torres, whose reference to Noam Chomsky would mark him as a first-timer even if his message wasn’t written with italics and exclamation points.

When Henry (Wilson) discovers he doesn’t have much longer to live—specifics aren’t revealed—he isolates himself, buying a house in the neighborhood where he grew up to soak up the vibes of the last place he remembers being happy. Turns out Henry’s choice is actually a hermit’s nightmare, with his real-estate agent (Cheryl Hines) and hood busybody Esperanza (Babel’s Adriana Barraza) immediately paying visits and a young, mute, I-see-dead-people-looking neighbor girl, Millie (Morgan Lily), recording and replaying his every conversation.

His quest to be left alone is really ruined, however, when Esperanza — the name means “hope” — becomes convinced that Henry’s bad stucco job actually reveals the face of Jesus Christ. Of course, Henry thinks she’s nuts and repeatedly asks her, not very politely, to stop bothering him. But she has her own tragedy fueling her belief, and so Esperanza starts inviting her priest (George Lopez) and friends looking for a blessing to Henry’s backyard.

Other intruders upon Henry’s privacy include Millie’s single mother, Dawn (Radha Mitchell), and an inquisitive supermarket cashier with Coke-bottle glasses, Patience (Rachel Seiferth)—anyone picking up the stench of symbolism? Everyone wants to know why Henry is so sad, why he keeps saying he won’t be living there long, why he won’t accept that the stain is a miracle, even after it begins healing people.

“Don’t you believe in God?” Esperanza asks, as if the possibility of atheism was unfathomable. Dawn, too, while not proclaiming her faith outright, uses phrases such as “I pray” a lot and tsk-tsks at the degree of doubt harbored by such a young man.

Director Mark Pellington (U2 3D) plasters seemingly every interlude with message-ballads such as Bob Dylan’s “Not Dark Yet,” including the scene in which Henry begins an aimless walk but ends up under a waterfront tunnel, where he’d go when his parents fought and marked the spot with “Henry Poole was here.” Though Henry doesn’t go in the river, a baptism of sorts—via water-balloon battle—does occur, after he begins to open up to Dawn and lets her, yes, light into his life.

You can feel the filmmakers’ manipulation at every turn, yet there’s a melancholy and life-is-a-gift spirit to Henry Poole Is Here that still conveys. Wilson’s Henry is palpably wounded, and you ache for him, especially when he approaches the perpetually mournful Millie and confesses that he sometimes doesn’t like to talk, either.

Beyond the script’s ideas about faith is a more interesting one, about what exactly one is supposed to do when handed a death sentence: Do you stop reaching out and continuing your routines, because you won’t be around to enjoy the benefits of either? What if you’re disease-free but destined to be killed in a car crash next week? These questions resonate, regardless of how you feel about Henry’s stain.

Pantsless in Pineapple

Forgive the phrasing, but the stoner comedy Pineapple Express starts on a high note. It’s 1937, on a military base filmed in black and white. (Stay with me: The prologue will make you wonder if you’re in the wrong theater even if you’re not baked.) The government is testing “Item 9” on one Pvt. Miller (Bill Hader), who’s forced to smoke the substance in a sealed room.

“How do you feel?” a researcher asks. “Well, sir, I feel like a slab of butter melting over…a big ol’ pile of flapjacks,” Miller says—extremely slowly. A follow-up about what Miller thinks of his boss induces a series of random impressions of musical instruments, assurances that “This [stuff] is great,” and then a string of expletives. The government’s conclusion is vehement and swift: “Illegal!”

Cut to the present, and Dale Denton (Seth Rogen) is toking and driving, also apparently demonstrating how harmless marijuana is by calling in to a talk show to argue for decriminalization. Dale makes his living as a process server, meaning he needs to come up with clever ways to deliver subpoenas and gets sworn at a lot.

To make life more pleasant, he smokes—constantly—and has recently begun buying from Saul (James Franco), the quintessential dealer: a genial longhair who’s on the couch nearly 24/7, watching old sitcoms and dozing with snacks close by. Saul is a puppy and takes a liking to Dale, selling him the new, rare strain of weed that gives the film its name and trying to get him to hang around by saying they can “look at some crazy things on the Internet together.”

The rapport between Rogen and Franco is immediately charming, and the movie’s best scenes are the early ones establishing their characters. Dale is typical Rogen, schlubby and stunted—he’s dating an 18-year-old high-school girl—but with hints of levelheaded promise. And Franco, a former member of the Judd Apatow family (Freaks and Geeks), has made up for years of forgettable, wooden dramatic turns with Saul: He’s more sweet than smart, loyal to his friends, and deals so he can take care of his grandma. Saul’s surfer-dude demeanor may scream stereotype, but Franco’s eyes have a sparkle beneath their glaze that’s irresistible.

More important, it’s pretty funny when they’re high together. Rogen and longtime friend/Superbad co-writer Evan Goldberg clearly write what they know: Watching the characters cough may get old fast, but odd stoner habits (what is it about ancient TV shows?) and conversations steered by short-term memory loss and sudden flares of hypersensitivity are more entertainingly subtle than the whoa-dude caricatures of Cheech & Chong and even Harold & Kumar.

But then Pineapple Express turns into an action movie, which is weird for a couple of reasons, not least of which is that the director is David Gordon Green, who made Snow Angels and All the Real Girls. Though the remainder of Pineapple Express’ 113 minutes isn’t exactly a comedown, the film starts to feel like it’s desperately chasing that first buzz.

Dale and Saul’s imbroglio begins when Dale is sitting in his car outside of the home of Ted Jones (Gary Cole), smoking while waiting to serve the guy papers. Dale freaks out when a cop (Rosie Perez) pulls up behind him; when she goes into Ted’s house and they both shoot a third man in plain view, Dale freaks some more.

He tosses his roach, spectacularly un-parallel parks, and runs to his only sorta-buddy for guidance. (The script is also sharp at addressing the unusual faux friendship that usually develops between a dealer and his clients.) When Saul tells him that he bought his stash of express indirectly from Ted—and that Dale’s the only person he’s sold it to—they hightail it, certain that Ted will find the joint and know that one of them witnessed the killing.

After a tedious scene of the pair hiding in the woods, the movie is overtaken by lots of hysteria and violence, countered only by interludes of now-familiar Apatowian bromance. Saul, Dale, and Saul’s supplier, Red (Danny McBride), bond, fight, and make up more realistically than anything starring Sandra Bullock; meanwhile, Dale’s relationship with his girlfriend (Amber Heard) exists only to show how immature he is.

The later scenes are fitfully amusing, but mostly just brash, if not downright surprising: Dale and Saul’s half-assed attempts at hand-to-hand combat are usually funny, but at some point the filmmakers go all Bad Boys on us, with machine guns wielded and people actually dying. In one scene, it seems as if Rogen, after Dale pile-drives Red into a wall, asks, “Was that too much?” as himself, not his character.

Yeah, it’s a little too much. But you’ll get that flapjack-butter feeling all over again when the guys later recap their adventure as if it were a crazy frat party—or a different movie.