Superbad came ten years too late.

Yes, I said it. If we had Superbad ten years ago, we wouldn’t have had a film like American Pie, and I know for a fact that Superbad made me laugh a lot more than American Pie did. What we have here is not just a funny movie, but a smart movie at that, with a lesson that packs a punch. You don’t know what you are getting yourself into while watching this movie. It’s about as raunchy as Animal House and as smart as Knocked Up.

Like American Graffiti and Dazed and Confused, Superbad takes place on a single day. Our characters are Evan, a guy so shy who never gets noticed by girls, and Seth, a fat kid that reminds me a lot of Cartman from South Park, but more perverted and more wanting for sex. Seth’s love interest, Jules, is throwing this big party that night while her parents are out of the town. Seth offers to buy beer for the party, and sets his plan in full motion. Tonight, he and Evan will get their love interests (Evan’s interest being Becca) drunk and have sex with them before leaving off to college.

But there’s a problem. See, to buy beer, you have to be over 21, right? And there is no way they can get a fake ID this soon, right? Well it just so happens that Evan’s roommate for college, Fogell, is getting his new fake ID after school. And the name on the ID just happens to be”¦ McLovin. It was either that or Mohammed. So he buys the beer and the woman at the counter of the liquor store just happens to buy it that he really is this McLovin guy, but he gets punched during a robbery, and the cops come, and it all goes downhill.

What I loved about Superbad is that it doesn’t follow the usual teen comedy rules. Instead, it breaks the law, literally and figuratively. Seth doesn’t really seem to know it, but getting these girls drunk and them having sex with them is against the law. Evan, being the pussy he is, says that it is wrong and that he just wants to tell his girl what he feels without getting her drunk. Once they go to the party, we actually see that Evan didn’t have to worry about getting her drunk. And sure, this film could be this year’s Can’t Hardly Wait, but there is just one problem — Can’t Hardly Wait didn’t have the balls that Superbad does. Superbad grabs teen comedies by the balls and fucking twists them. All of them teen comedies that you love don’t have a lesson to it, but Superbad does, and it isn’t one of them corny ones either.

And then, we have our characters. Some of these characters we can relate to, and most of us do relate to them somehow. Jonah Hill and Michael Cera definitely have the chemistry together, and it feels like that they have known each other forever. I’ve always have been a big fan of Cera and his character in Arrested Development, but this definitely beats it. And you have Hill, the fat guy with the weird looking hair. He really does put on a show for us. Within the first ten minutes of the movie, you get a feeling that this guy is really going to be an obnoxious fat slob, but later on in the movie, he actually gets a change of heart, and he really does change his ways and stops acting like a prick.

But the REAL show in this film is Christopher Mintz-Plasse. He plays Fogell, who is so uncool that he doesn’t even know how uncool he is. He actually makes Hill and Cera look like that they are big-time jocks. When he walks through the door of the home-ec room, I literally pissed my pants when he said, “Sup gangstas?” And then comes twenty minutes later into the movie Seth Rogan and Bill Hader as the worst/best (it matters how you look at it) cops ever. They say that they will take Fogell — as McLovin — to the party but first off they have to go to the bar and kick this one guy out. What they find out is that McLovin is just as badass as what the name states, by stopping the guy who started at the bar. That means that McLovin is officially one of them, and they go out and stop crime and drink beers and shoot guns and do donuts and run red lights.

But what is so intriguing that really makes Superbad a great and funny film is that it has a heart, and it keeps to the storyline. We care about these characters and what is going on. In one of the funniest scenes in the movie, Bill Hader’s character tells Fogell/McLovin how not to pick up girls in the bar, and how to pick them up at paintball courses. What we don’t notice until the end of the movie is how miserable Rogan and Hader’s characters really are with their jobs and lives, and how they just want to have a great time with Fogell/McLovin so he doesn’t turn out as miserable as them.

Although with a movie like Superbad may seem perfect to someone that is directed to this type of humor, it does have some faults. The biggest one is that it was too long, and it dragged a bit during the scene at the first party that they went to. As much as I wanted to laugh at a lot of those scenes, I just couldn’t. They just weren’t that funny.

So how about it? Are you “Superbad”?

*** out of ****