2007 / 129 Minutes / R
Reviewed by Dale Nauertz

To most guys, “Knocked Up” will be more terrifying than “The Exorcist” and “Hostel” combined. An affable loser (played with lazy grace by Seth Rogen) goes to a club and hooks up with a beautiful woman far out of his league. One beer leads to another and Seth ends up knocking boots with this hottie (and Katherine Heigl is most definitely a hottie). So far, so good. It’s like the start of “Hostel” where this dude in Amsterdam tells the guys about the superhot babes with lax morals just waiting to hump Americanos in Eastern Europe. Then however, comes the part with the saw blades and the eyeballs: the hottie ends up pregnant. Now our affable stoner faces a moral conundrum: does he support this beautiful career woman or does he bail? And how does a man with little forward direction in his life deal with such a scenario? Does he retire the bong? Does he get a real job and learn to grow up? Do they have to get married now?

Judd Apatow, the writer and director of “Knocked Up” and the steady hand behind 2005’s “The 40 Year Old Virgin” gets points for not going in the obvious direction with this material. This could easily have become another “Cheaper By the Dozen” (which this movie attacks at one point) full of cutesy moments regarding parenthood and how awesome it is. It could also have gone a little dumber and been the usual chick flick about how all guys are complete bastards who would rather run a child down with their Lexus than be a good father. I liked that Seth’s character was a nice guy who began to genuinely love the woman he impregnated and dealt with the consequences of his actions…while still realistically acting like kind of a man child. I also loved that Katherine Heigl’s career woman wasn’t a scheming harpy devastated by the thing growing in her uterus as the average Hollywood career troll would have been. Abortion is mentioned once or twice early on in this movie but these characters are the sort who wouldn’t even regard that as an option (refreshing in the liberal utopia that is Hollywood). They’re loving, sweet souls with messy lives. They face up to their actions, even when they hate having to do so. I came to love Katherine and Seth. Hell, I even came to love Paul Rudd and Leslie Mann as Katherine’s bickering sister and brother-in-law. They could have been shrill and obnoxious, but instead they come across as real people with real problems doing their best to work through them. They only occasionally came off as shrill and obnoxious.

However, I’m not going to jump on the “Judd Apatow Can Do No Wrong, Can He Please Father My Baby” bandwagon just yet. Every other critic in America is already doing that, but I shall do my best to abstain. This bandwagon started rolling in the glorious summer/fall of ‘05 (which I love calling Ought 5 because it makes me sound like an old timey prospector) after “The 40 Year Old Virgin” was proclaimed the greatest comedy in the history of mankind (or something along those lines) and is picking up steam with the release of this film. Don’t get me wrong: I loved “The 40 Year Old Virgin”. It was hilarious, it was more character-driven than most raunchy comedies and it had an underlying sweetness to it that was disarming. And Judd Apatow directed and co-wrote that movie. He even had his wife, Leslie Mann, make an uproarious cameo in it (she was the drunk chick who puked seafood and daiquiris). However, as great as “The 40 Year Old Virgin” was, it was too long and it was instantly overrated. Those are pretty much my only problems with it. Other than that, it was solid gold.

“Knocked UP” is the new film from Judd Apatow and, yes, like “The 40 Year Old Virgin” it is a raunchy comedy with underlying sweetness and a refreshingly deep interest in its characters. Leslie Mann, Paul Rudd and Seth Rogen are in both movies, though they all get a bit more to sink their teeth into, character-wise, in “Knocked Up”. Unfortunately, like “The 40 Year Old Virgin”, it runs a little long and is sometimes a bit too overly raunchy. The racy scenes in “The 40 Year Old Virgin” were more organic. That’s a film about a guy who hasn’t had sex, so of course many of his buddies are going to make crude references to sex. As a guy best described as a “late bloomer” I could identify with the honesty of this material. With “Knocked UP”, however, it’s as though Apatow and his gang decided to put in so many crude jokes because the crude jokes worked so well in his previous film. The crude humor doesn’t work as well this time around. A lot of the raunchier jokes fall flat. “Knocked Up” also suffers from a few too many pop-culture references (at times I almost mistook it as an infomercial for “Spider Man 3″). Even though most of the characters in the film make their livings via popular culture, the references did get a little annoying after while.

The most surprising thing about this movie, however, is how damned mean a lot of it is. This is a mean-spirited film with a lot of yelling and cursing that isn’t all that funny because it’s far too raw and far too real. Though I did enjoy that brutal honesty during a lot of the movie. People say mean things when they are angry, and a lot of it felt spot on as far as what characters of this sort would actually say in these situations. During several scenes, however (including a phone call to an absentee gynecologist) the movie just turns vicious. Certain scenes of this film were almost like spending a Saturday night in the basement of Michael Vick’s house.

All in all, though, “Knocked Up” is an excellent comedy. It’s got the smarts of a Woody Allen movie, the raunchy humor of a Kevin Smith movie and the sweetness of a Nora Ephron or Farrelly Brothers movie but without most of the flaws that those filmmakers’ movies suffer from. As far as relationship comedies go, it wasn’t quite as good as 2005’s wonderful “Fever Pitch”, but it’s leaps and bounds better than most cinematic comedies nowadays, almost as hysterical as “The 40 Year Old Virgin”, sharply observed and largely honest with its characters and their situations. It’s probably more grounded in the real world and more relatable than “The 40 Year Old Virgin”. But “The 40 Year Old Virgin” wasn’t quite as mean, and was therefore a bit funnier.

[tags]Seth Rogen, Katherine Heigl, Judd Apatow, Paul Rudd, The 40 Year Old Virgin, crude humor, comedy, Dale Nauertz[/tags]

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This entry was posted on Friday, June 1st, 2007 at 7:28 pm and is filed under Dale's Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.