Get Him to the Greek (2010)

Get Him to the Greek enters the cultural ledger as a 2010 spin-off of Forgetting Sarah Marshall, which is to say it was assembled from parts that already worked, and it knows it. Nicholas Stoller sends Jonah Hill's nervy record-company intern across two continents in pursuit of Russell Brand's decaying rock god, and the result is a raunchy road comedy of escalating indignity. It has no thesis. It wants only to make us laugh at a man vomiting into a hotel carpet, and it largely succeeds.

The film does keep a few non-white faces in its margins. Sean Combs plays the label chief with genuine comic menace, and Mario Lopez drifts through in a cameo. Neither presence is arranged as an argument about anything, and the movie never pauses to congratulate itself for them. The closest it comes to a social idea is "African Child," the catastrophically well-meaning charity single that opens the story. That joke is aimed at the vanity of wealthy performers, not at the structures that produce poverty. Mocking a bad pop song is not a politics.

Elsewhere the film's moral inventory is bare. There is a kiss between the two leads, deployed for a laugh and abandoned within seconds. There is a scene in which Hill's character is raped by a woman, staged as farce, which critics at the time rightly found repellent. Women here exist to be slept with, yelled at, or dismissed. Corporate malfeasance is a source of gags about spreadsheets, never a critique worth pursuing. Nobody lectures us, which is its own small mercy, but nobody thinks about anything either. Sometimes a comedy just needs to get to the show on time. This one does, and the ledger stays almost empty.