Goldberg & Rogen: This Is The End (2013)

It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of bromance. At least that’s the premise of Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg’s latest offering, an apocalyptic comedy that sees the extended Bro Pack bunkering down in James Franco’s house when the end times hit Los Angeles. At first, the film includes pretty much everyone who’s had any contact with this core of comedians over the last decade, from Michael Cera to Aziz Ansari, but it’s gradually whittled down to Rogen, Franco, Jonah Hill, Jay Baruchel, Craig Robinson and Danny McBride.

In some ways, that’s a natural move, since these actors have all been working together for years now. Their rapport is so natural that it might not really be that different from how they would act or interact with each other if left to their own devices, which makes the film seem as cosy, intimate and incidental as a sitcom, or a sitcom seguing into reality television, even as Los Angeles is decimated outside. Danny McBride and Jonah Hill are particularly memorable, just because they seem more willing to skewer their own pretensions than any of the others – especially Franco, who can’t quite seem to laugh at himself as pointedly or as profoundly as the film wants him to. Admittedly, McBride devotes a lot of his role to trying to rectify that, to the point where it feels like he’s rehearsing Franco’s celebrity roast. But without the rest of the cast to share his viciousness, it tends to fall a bit flat, and perhaps feels a bit more vicious than it really is.

For all the pleasures of seeing these actors working in tandem, though, the sheer sweep of familiar faces in the opening party scenes is perhaps most fascinating. Encompassing all the fringes of the bromance universe, it’s too broad and fleeting to constitute an ensemble cast, but too irreverant and casual to feel like a series of cameos either. Instead, it’s somewhat like the proliferation of celebrities and celerities in Robert Altman’s The Player – a series of faces and figures who seem to cross in and out of the diegesis quite casually and obliviously. While it doesn’t quite give the illusion of being shot at an actual party at Franco’s house, it doesn’t quite feel staged either – it’s as if Franco had a party for the purpose of shooting the scene, and the party organically morphed into something other than the movie, meaning that there’s all kinds of cinephilic glimpses of actors in conversation and interaction that are quite fascinating. In that sense, it’s a canonical gesture, a gathering of the comic threads of the last few years – Michael Cera is here, but so is Aziz Ansari – as well as an apocalyptic gesture, since it’s just as fascinating to figure out who hasn’t been chosen as to calibrate how the centre of comic gravity has shifted and settled among the elect. Films that look like a lot of fun to make aren’t always that fun to watch, but this is an exception, since there’s an oddly poignant intimacy and access to these actor-characters that’s both elegiac and irreverent, an end-time that's of its time.