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PREMIERE.COM'S REVIEW (posted 8/16/07)

So it's not particularly inventive, it's juvenile, it bears more than a passing resemblance to a million "last day of school" teen comedies, and it has a title Gene Shalit is praising his mustachioed god for — but you know what? None of that matters at all. Bottom line: Superbad is just funny.

Although Judd Apatow and Seth Rogan have fully cemented their place as the new go-to guys for laughs (the Frat Pack has had its moment in the sun — this is the summer the Geek Squad took over), the majority of the credit for most of what makes Superbad work goes to Hill and Cera. At first, they seem like the same kind of porn-obsessed, foul-mouthed dorks that populate most of Apatow's movies, but slowly it becomes clear what, in fact, Superbad is all about: This is a platonic-love story. It captures that year or so when teenage boys want desperately to put girls first, but are so terrified of the prospect that they take comfort in that best pal who's been with them since before sex became an issue. Despite the raunchiness of some of the film's dialogue, the underlying sweetness fueling the antics makes it all click. The teens come across as so much less irritating and a thousand times more genuine than, say, the obnoxious American Pie clan. Cera, especially, is making good on his Arrested Development promise — he's like a gentler Chevy Chase, delivering off-hand lines under his breath and in-between stutters that are hilarious if you catch them.

The plot, as it is, involves Cera and Hill's desperate search for booze so that they can impress a couple of hotties hosting an end-of-high-school bash (again, standard stuff). Looming on the horizon, however, is the boys' unsettling and imminent separation: Cera's Evan is headed to Dartmouth in the fall, while Hill's Seth can only hope for community college. Their booze-raid plans also force them to reluctantly team up with even-dorkier (and also Dartmouth-bound) Fogell (Mintz-Plasse), the bearer of the soon-to-be-infamous "McLovin" fake ID. (Seriously, the one caveat about this movie is that you may want to see it early on, before it becomes an irritatingly over-quoted and -merchandised monster like Napoleon Dynamite or Borat.) The rest of the film is a hilarious mess of lost booze, irresponsible cops, and other assorted mishaps.

Although the movie occasionally tries to dilute its "straight male love story" with slightly defensive gay sex jokes (like Seth and Evan's Brokeback Mountain–tinged sleepover, which isn't needed even if it is squirmingly funny), Superbad is just a great time, plain and simple.

— Eric Alt