Viking Night: Half Baked
By Bruce Hall
December 1, 2015
BoxOfficeProphets.com
Half Baked feels like it was assembled from the scattered bits of a drug obsessed adolescent’s manic psyche and hammered into the same forgettable not-quite-90-minute template as countless low budget comedies before and since. If that sounds like faint praise, then congratulations - you are not currently stoned, and you are hearing me correctly. But while it’s far from his best work, Half Baked offers a funny little glimpse into the future genius behind the short lived Chappelle's Show. And because it doesn’t get said enough, I’ll say it here: Jim Breuer isn’t a great actor, but he’s a hell of a comedian and when he’s in his element, he just kills.
And he’s in his element in Half Baked.
After trying pot on a dare when they were kids, Thurgood Jenkins (Chappelle) and his idiot friends Brian (Breuer), Kenny (Harland Williams), and Scarface (Guillermo Diaz) become life-long connoisseurs and come to enjoy the kind of career success that comes to most people who can’t get enough of the chronic. Kenny becomes the jewel of the bunch, eventually landing a job as a Kindergarten teacher, which is the educational equivalent of heaven for someone enjoying an almost constant residual high. But the good times come to an end when he accidentally kills a diabetic police horse (yes, the Googles tell me that apparently horses can get diabetes) by feeding it junk food.
So, Kenny ends up facing an eternity in prison for being a “cop killer”. Not only is his bail about a hundred thousand dollars, but poor Kenny is a delicate flower, not really cut out for life up the river. Luckily, Thurgood works as a janitor for a pharmaceutical firm that happens to be working on its own strain of medical marijuana - and it is some seriously kind bud. The Gang decides to pilfer from the company stash and sell it on the street to raise the bail. It goes pretty well, and the irony is that if any of these people had shown this level of ingenuity at any previous point in life, they probably wouldn’t have needed to sell illegal weed to spring their friend from the rape farm for accidentally killing a police horse with Skittles in the first place.
Still, hard work is hard work. And stupid is as stupid does. The guys quickly rake in enough money to free Kenny, but they can’t resist the temptation to live it up, spending most of it on stupid personal indulgences. Not only that, their biggest client happens to be eccentric rapper Sir Smokes-a-Lot (also Chapelle), drawing the ire of Sir Smoke’s previous supplier, eccentric bloodthirsty crime lord Samson Simpson (Clarence Williams III). And proving that bad things really do come in threes, the pharmaceutical company gets wise to the pot theft, leading to even more trouble with the police. Yeah, it’s just one madcap mix up after another, except it’s not nearly as much fun as it sounds (assuming this sounds fun to you). Tamra Davis (CB4, Billy Madison) competently holds things together behind the camera, but that’s only slightly more impressive than a disgraced Johnny Manziel leading your high school football team to the state title next year.
It’s a notable achievement, accomplished in an environment hardly worthy of the effort.
Half Baked is like most “stoner” films, which assume that their audience is so notoriously uncritical that little to no effort is necessary. There are lots of stoner jokes, a flying dog...there’s a boob...and some very predictable prison rape jokes. There’s also a lazy deus ex machina at the climax of the film. There’s even a love subplot which exists for no other reason than to satisfy the Federal law that apparently requires one in every comedy, whether it adds anything to the story or not. In a sense, it’s the perfect movie for anyone who wants to get baked and spend an hour and a half laughing at the kind of self-serving humor you can only appreciate WHEN you’re baked.
You could accomplish the same thing by smoking a bowl and staring at a saltwater aquarium for 82 minutes. But keeping an aquarium pretty enough to appreciate when you’re high takes a lot of work. Watching Half Baked doesn’t require you to leave the couch - or even remove your off-hand from that bag of Cheetos. On the upside, there are some amusing cameos; the most interesting part of the film has a little fun with stoner stereotypes. This leads to appearances by well-known weed advocates like Willie Nelson and Snoop Dogg, comedy stalwarts like Janeane Garofalo and Stephen Wright, as well as some cool “before they were famous” moments from Tracy Morgan and Jon Stewart.
On the one hand, expecting more than a minimal level of quality from a movie made mostly for drug addicts is probably stupid on my part. Then again, how hard is it to make a movie like this just a little bit better than it was? We’re not talking about liberating France or putting men on the moon; we’re talking about punching up a mediocre script so that you don’t have to develop a crippling reefer habit to appreciate it. But when you can make a profit (and this movie did) without really trying, why would you ever, EVER make an effort again? Oh my God...it’s almost like people who make movies are often indistinguishable from drug addicts!
I think I’m going to go eat a plate of brownies and stare at some fish while I contemplate my increasingly meaningless place in the universe.