Half Baked (1998)

Half Baked arrived in January of 1998 with a modest budget, a cast of agreeable stoners, and a critical reception that can charitably be called hostile. The plot concerns four roommates who must raise bail for a gentle kindergarten teacher who has killed a diabetic police horse named Buttercup with junk food. This is the film's central crisis, and it is treated with the gravity of a parking ticket. Tamra Davis directs with a loose, hangout rhythm, and the result is a comedy that neither aspires to nor achieves anything beyond the pursuit of a laugh.

The ensemble is notably diverse for its era, with Dave Chappelle, Guillermo Díaz, Rachel True, and Clarence Williams III filling out the cast. None of this is remarked upon. The film simply assembles its players and gets on with the business of jokes about munchies and paranoia. That a woman sits in the director's chair, and that Rachel True's Mary Jane serves as the story's lone voice of restraint, are facts the film neither celebrates nor examines. Its attitude toward women stays firmly locker-room in register, and its treatment of race amounts to an absence of comment. Any social awareness here is incidental, a byproduct of casting instead of a thesis.

What lingers is a faint, good-natured advocacy for marijuana, delivered not through speeches but through a parade of cameo smokers: Jon Stewart, Snoop Dogg, Willie Nelson as a so-called historian, and the ghost of Jerry Garcia, who materializes to dispatch the villain. The film's economic politics are purely entrepreneurial, a get-rich-quick scheme dressed in tie-dye, and its environmental conscience is nonexistent. It is a product of its moment, agreeable and weightless, and it asks nothing of its audience beyond a willingness to laugh at a horse.