‘Half Baked’ scrapes bottom of bag

By Gus Bode

You’d almost think a movie about smoking marijuana couldn’t go wrong in terms of laughs because people high on grass find everything funny. That’s assuming the only people who saw it smoked weed.

But for those few who chose to (or had to) see Half-Baked sober, it is almost insulting. And I don’t mean that in a conservative, Tipper Gore kind of way. Whatever junior high schoolers came up with this bongwash they call a script forgot to include any creative originality that could pass as humor.

The premise could be funny if it was done in a halfway plausible manner, but instead we get a completely baked story of four longtime friends and roommates whose lives basically revolve around getting high on grass.

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Their lives suddenly stray from the work/score weed/smoke weed/eat routine when Kenny (Harland Williams) is tried, convicted and sentenced to jail (all in about 30 seconds) for feeding junk food to a diabetic police horse.

It is now solely up to Brian (Jim Breuer), Thurgood (Dave Chappelle) and Scarface (Guillermo Diaz) to spring Kenny out of the big house, but their jobs as janitors and fast food cooks can’t quite cut the $100,000 bail.

Instead of counting pennies, they opt to start selling the weed Thurgood has been snagging from the pharmaceutical company he mops floors for.

As fund-raisers selling grass and not dealers selling grass (an odd move in political correctness), the three stoners begin advertising their weed somehow without attracting the attention of the police and making tall cash.

We watch as Thurgood, Brian and Scarface venture from one pot-smoking character all idiosyncratic stoner stereotypes to the next, selling their product.

There is a light-hearted love sub-plot when Thurgood falls for Mary Jane (Rachel True), who happens to despise marijuana and won’t be with him unless he quits smoking grass.

Director Tamra Davis’ effort to be creative is evident in the popular cinematic style of modern-day comedies, but the jokes are too cheap, overused and unoriginal for anyone to honestly care about this movie.

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Breuer’s stoner look and dialect stand out among the acting mainly as the most annoying part. It’s funny for a little bit, but after awhile it begins to grow on you like crusty resin.

Janeane Garafolo, Snoop Doggy Dogg, and Stephen Baldwin, among others, show up in small and wasted cameos. Without this star support I wouldn’t be surprised if Half-Baked had gone straight to video.

For a movie with such a politically incorrect agenda, there isn’t anything new or exciting that hadn’t already been done in movies like Dazed and Confused and Cheech and Chong’s Next Movie. Rent those instead of seeing this cinematic bung weed.

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