 Any movie titled Superbad would appear to be inviting negative reviews from critics. But, for the most part, critics are declining the invitation. Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times, in fact, gives it a 3 1/2-star rating and writes that the movie "is a four-letter raunch-a-rama with a heart ... astonishingly foul-mouthed, but in a fluent, confident way where the point isn't the dirty words, but the flow and rhythm, and the deep, sad yearning they represent." Likewise Carina Chocano remarks in the Los Angeles Times, "Wide-eyed and sincere as it is hilariously, unrepentantly profane, the movie aims to express what it's like to stare down the barrel of your first foray into adulthood, and it's not afraid to be honest about it." Manohla Dargis in the New York Times is inspired to write a similar description in raunchier terms (befitting the movie itself, apparently, but hardly the prose one would expect to find in the pages of the Times.) "If the penis is puzzled in Portnoy's Complaint, as Alexander Portnoy's shrink believes, in Superbad it is thoroughly, stunningly clueless and as violently tremulous as a divining rod at Hoover Dam," she comments. Gene Seymour in Newsday assures wary filmgoers, however, that "no matter how outrageously prurient things get, you never once feel as though you're being jabbed in the ribs or shoved face-first into the muck of hormonal excess." Joanne Kaufman in the Wall Street Journal describes the movie as "the canny evocation of male friendship in all its richness and complexity." And Ann Hornaday concludes in the Washington Post: "Superbad proves itself to be not just smutty and stupid, but tender and all too aware of the rue that can lie behind the smiles of a summer night." |
