Cinemavenger

   The funniest, nastiest movie reviews anywhere.

The Night Before

I'm all for capitalism, but come the fuck on.  Kids still have tummy aches from too much candy, and adults are fighting hangovers from Halloween night boozing when the first Xmas-themed commercials hit the TV.  Corporate America's insatiable hunger for profits keeps pushing the start of "Xmas season" earlier and earlier.  At this rate, Uncle Sam will be wearing a Santa hat on the Fourth of July.  So say it with me now.

Fuck you, you fucking fucks!

You know who the real victim of all this greed-driven assholery is?  Thanksgiving.  If Xmas starts right after Halloween, Thanksgiving becomes a forgotten, redheaded stepchild.  Faster than you can say "Jack Frost nipping at your cock," Thanksgiving will be sitting next to Arbor Day on the Island of Misfit Holidays.

Won't somebody please think of the pilgrims?!

So here we are, a week before Thanksgiving, and there's already a lump of coal in our unhung stockings in the form of The Night Before.  Because nothing says Xmas like a second-rate, stoner bro-medy in the middle of November.

You know how you know your stoner bro-medy is second rate?  When it can't even compete with the hackiest, third entry in the Harold & Kumar series.  And The Night Before isn't fit to clean A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas's bong.

Chris (Anthony "Big" Mackie), Ethan ("Jesus, Mary and" Joseph Gordon-Levitt) and Isaac (Seth "Fozzie" Rogen), are college buddies now in their thirties.  Since Ethan's parents died 14 years ago, the three have spent every Xmas Eve in Manhattan acting like wasted Japanese tourists.  First off is Rockefeller Center.  Then they head to FAO Schwarz to play on the giant keyboard from Big.  After that, in a nod to Isaac being a Jew, it's dinner at a Chinese restaurant before busting out some RUN-DMC at a karaoke joint.  The boys have always wanted to cap their XXXmas fun off by making it to a fabled party called the Nutcracker Ball, but they've never been able to score tickets.

If you can't guess whether they end up balls-out at the Ball this year, you've either never seen a holiday movie or you're not the brightest bulb on the Xmas tree.

Isaac, the red-eyed reindeer, spends the whole movie whacked out on enough drugs to make 1990s Robert Downey Jr. jealous.  Rogen's "Look at me, I'm high!" shtick was funny when we first saw it in The 40-Year-Old Virgin.  It still earned a chuckle or two a few years back in Paul.  Now, it's aging about as well as that fruitcake your family's been regifting for the past decade.

I'd rather have my chestnuts roasted on an open fire than have to sit through another The Night Before, but they're probably already working on a prequel, The NightBefore The Night Before.

November 22, 2015