I was skeptical about “Get Him to the Greek” from the outset for a couple of reasons: It’s a spin-off of “Forgetting Sarah Marshall,” which I pretty much hated, and the one-note premise about a bumbling young music exec (Jonah Hill) struggling to get burnt-out rock star Aldous Snow (Russell Brand, reprising his “Marshall” character) to L.A.‘s Greek Theatre within a small window of time sounds like a simple excuse for endless sophomoric humor. And for a little while, that’s exactly what it is. At a certain point, however, Hill’s eyes look like they’re about to bulge right out of his head, and the movie’s satiric edge takes on a sudden inspired lunacy. When Hill and Brand show up in Las Vegas so the musician can reconcile with his deadbeat dad (Colm Meaney), Hill’s boss (Puff Daddy, firing crazy on all cylinders) enters the picture convinced that they can party Aldous into submission. This establishes a near-brilliant comic set-piece in which virtually every drug comes into play, as do firearms and pyrotechnics, with the breathless excitement of cast and crew working together in the service of a unified spoof. “Now this is what the music business is all about!” P. Diddy declares as the room blazes behind him. Talk about an indictment.
The rest of the movie comes nowhere near the utter delight of the Vegas sequence, although the late-in-the-game sexual gags are unexpectedly odd in a mostly positive way, as if they stumbled into the picture from a decent Kevin Smith movie.
But “Greek” is basically worth the price of admission for the mayhem that transpires somewhere near the end of the second act. For a moment there, I felt as though I was watching Martin and Lewis in their prime, or perhaps the contemporary version of the sarcasm expressed in the opening segment of “Sullivan’s Travels” (click to see). And that means there might be more potential for the kind of modern studio comedies that many of us wrote off a long time ago. Forget Sarah Marshall; this is the good stuff. Imdb 6.9/10 and I suggest you that you'll not be disappointed after watching a nice comedy after sometime.Enjoy!
