Film Review: 'The Night Before'

In “The Night Before,” Seth Rogen wears a beard and glasses, a professorial look befitting his status as the dean of bro comedy. That the glasses often need to be pushed up his sweaty and cocaine-dusted nose only adds to their aura of significance. Rogen plays Isaac, one of three “ride-or-die homies” who share a longstanding Christmas Eve bond that involves ugly knit sweaters and a strong desire to crash the legendary Nutcracker Ball. Isaac’s cohorts are Ethan, a lovelorn musician with no discernible talent or motivation, and Chris, an aging pro football player whose drug of choice is steroids-Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Anthony Mackie inhabit these characters with disappointingly flatness. And Rogen is saddled with an overlong look-I’m-on-coke-and-shrooms subplot that ruins his arc as an insecure first-time father, the only part of his character with any depth. “The Night Before” runs up against that age-old conundrum: if Seth Rogen’s antics are the best thing in your movie, how good can the movie possibly be?

The film has small parts for perhaps the best working American actor (Michael Shannon, as a weed-dispensing angel) and surely the worst (James Franco, as an…enthusiastic texter of images). The stars also get entangled with Mindy Kaling, Lizzy Caplan and Ilana Glazer, to name three women you remember being funny, just not here.

Director Jonathan Levine, a second wave bro comedy auteur, tries to punch up his thin material with references to yuletide classics from “It’s a Wonderful Life” to “How the Grinch Stole Christmas,” though he returns most frequently and convincingly to “Home Alone.”

After many, many dragging gags, the bros stumble into the illustrious Nutcracker Ball…and the party turns out to be no better than one you’d find in a light beer commercial. The fete is just like the film itself-you hang around listening to average banter because there might be a celebrity cameo soon.

The moment of catharsis comes back to a truism of our time: Miley Cyrus’s “Wrecking Ball” is a great song for any situation-you can cry to it, you can party to it, and you can use it to symbolize the death of a spent genre.

• • •

“The Night Before” is showing at the Sonoma 9 Cinemas. Rated R. Running time 1:41. Visit www.cinemawest.com.