Christmas did not come early this year. Or at least it didn’t come early for The Night Before, even though it’s a Christmas comedy getting its US release a week before Thanksgiving. I guess most of the country felt the same way as I did; that the time was not yet ripe for Yuletide frivolity, and stayed well away. Maybe its numbers will rise the nearer we get to the holidays, and the further away from the national mood of incoherent anger and wet-eyed panic in the wake of the Paris attacks, but on the comedic evidence available I can’t see that happening.
I wonder if Seth Rogen has thought back to last Christmas, when a different kind of panic saw his Kim Jong-un-baiting film The Interview pulled from theatres at the last moment and released instead on Netflix, or if he thought back to just last month, when his most recent outing, playing Steve Wozniak in Steve Jobs, took an unexpected spanking at the box-office.
The Night Before suggests that, beyond a lousy release date, the national appetite for the Rogen brand of weed-bro comedy may have begun to evaporate. But I think the real problem is the chasm that yawns between the energy of Superbad, which is still a non-stop riot eight years later, and The Night Before, which will be nothing of the kind eight years hence. This script had four writers in two teams and you can feel the baggy seams and the patchy upholstery work throughout. Too many writers gave us too many plotlines and too few reasons to care about them or the characters.
These are three lifelong friends – Rogen, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Anthony Mackie – who gather every Christmas Eve to party wildly. This year is the last time, though, as Rogen is about to become a first-time father and Mackie, at 34, is suddenly a famous American football player (thanks to steroids) – thus it’s their last chance to help Gordon-Levitt face adulthood and responsibility at last. Armed with a gift-box of marijuana, cocaine and mushrooms from Rogen’s hugely pregnant wife (Jillian Bell), they hit the New York streets in search of the legendary freak-out party Tha Nutcracka Ball.
Besides a few moments when everything comes together, such as Rogen’s first time at midnight mass (on mushrooms), some hair-raising iPhone dick-pic antics and a sweet-spot rap-karaoke scene, The Night Before struggles to raise a laugh. It completely wastes three incandescent female talents – Lizzy Caplan, Mindy Kaling and, for the most part, Bell – but still finds time for a lame James Franco cameo (spoiler alert: yeah, it’s his penis).
And that’s a pity, because I like Rogen a lot: he’s the nearest thing mankind has to Fozzie Bear in non-Muppet form. Let’s hope he pulls it together next time out. In the mean time, dig out your old copies of A Very Harold & Kumar Christmas. You won’t regret it.
