'Half Baked' proves chronically schwag

By Josh Malbin

I can never tell whether I'm supposed to be too cool for camp. Half Baked, a quixotic tale of a group of potheads fighting the law, is clearly counting on a turnout of irony-loving college students to go along with their target audience of high school stoners. As a result, the flick is partially salvaged by a few passages of brilliant self-reflexivity, but the rest is little more than a hit-or-miss montage of frustrated attempts at humor.

Dave Chappelle has described Half Baked as the Trainspotting of marijuana, but the problem is that while heroin was at least chic then, pot hasn't been hip since high school. We all have affection for high school, and that ironic affection is the basis of camp. But Half Baked doesn't aspire wholeheartedly to camp; it's actually trying to be funny. In fact, it's trying so hard to be nothing more than a series of funny moments strung together that it forgoes any structural subtlety which might bail it out when these moments fail to be funny.

Some of the jokes come off well, such as the scene when Thurgood (Dave Chappelle) volunteers to participate in marijuana experiments by telling the doctors, "My grandfather was in the Tuskegee Experiment." And some moments are unequivocally brilliant, like the episode when Thurgood finds himself at a substance-abuse support group. In the middle of his confession to the rest of the group, he is chased off the podium by Bob Saget, who screams, "I sucked a dick for cocaine! Have you ever sucked a dick for marijuana?" It is moments such as this one that save Half Baked from being a complete failure. They occur most frequently during the cameo scenes, showcasing such sundry stars as Steven Wright, Tommy Chong, Willie Nelson, and Janeane Garofalo. And of course, no movie would be complete without a Baldwin or two thrown in for good measure.

But more often, Half Baked's half-baked attempts at humor fail. The love interest is named "Mary Jane," for chrissakes, giving rise to predictable confusion. And there's even a scene where the boys give their Rottweiler a contact high, and later do the same to two detectives. Please.

There is also a Batman fight scene towards the end, complete with evil bikini-wearing henchwomen, in which a breast is exposed and everybody stops fighting to stare. Jim Breuer falls down a lot due to his Birkenstocks. Hilarious.

The basic problem with the movie is that these potheads do too much--they're too active. The potheads I know spend a lot of time on the couch, flicking bottle caps at the TV. If you need to kill some time when Half Baked is out on video, go ahead. It won't hurt. But $7.50 to watch three guys mug displeasure at Jim Breuer's foot odor? I don't think so.

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• Get 'Half Baked' at the official website from Universal Pictures

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