How High

I desperately wanted to like "How High." The very second I heard Method Man and Redman tear it up on the classic hip-hop joint from which this film takes its name, I knew its diabolically catchy chorus would be lodged in my brain forever. And when I heard that Mister Meth and the Funk Doctor Spock would be starring in a film about the two rhyme stars smoking some incredibly fine pot and riding the high straight to Harvard, my excitement was palpable.

Marijuana comedies rarely achieve (or attempt) common cinematic goals like "plot" and "characterization," but they also fill the theatre with such intoxicating humor that you rarely care. I wanted to see Johnny Blaze and Reggie Noble smoke up, wise up and tear up the screen to such a degree that I wouldn't care about everything else that was going on. To put it bluntly, to get my fix of ganja humor, I was prepared to endure bad filmmaking.

But I was not prepared to endure filmmaking this bad. No one could be prepared to endure filmmaking this bad.

Setting up the premise of this film takes about ten minutes. That means that screenwriter Dustin Lee Abraham had to fill up at least eighty more minutes with something or other. Not only did he fill it with amazingly lamebrained subplots and characters for whom the term "one-dimensional" would be a compliment, he stole all of them from other horrible movies.

There's the sweet girl dating the insensitive monied jock who melts when she gets the kind attention of Silas (Meth). There's the daughter of the Vice-President of the United States who's just gotta get a roughneck, and that roughneck ends up being Jamal (Redman). And while they're not making romance, the rappers play Mary Jane-related pranks on a crusty old Dean in an attempt to get him to light(en) up, along the way convincing the rest of the faculty to get funkier than they ever got before.

"The Simpsons" and other organs of satire laughed this kind of plotting to death years ago when it featured boozing white boys in outcast frats, but Universal apparently decided that it would be miraculously reinvigorated if Hot Nikkels and Spock could be persuaded to light it up. While our heroes are pretty funny in this film, they're not funny enough, because no one in the history of cinematic comedy could rescue this material. It feels like Abraham simply took actual jokes from other films and pumped them full of race-appropriate slang. One character even says, without irony, "That would be letting the Dean win!" What a bringdown.

Admittedly, "How High" does provide a few original touches, such as the fact that the Dean himself is black, and only needs a couple marijuana brownies to rediscover his ability to dance and to play the dozens with wealthy benefactors. Spalding Gray also attacks his cameo as a Whitey-hating black history professor with surprising gusto.

But these occasional spasms of humor are defeated by tone-destroying violence, ineptly handled gross-out gags, a spectacled, poorly endowed, cringe-inducing stereotype of an Asian kid, and and a subplot which features the normally hilarious Mike Epps as a pimp but which has no obvious relationship to this film. It's not just that the plot is stupid; the movie actually works against its own funny parts.

Of course, the marijuana takes center stage most of the time, and it provides opportunities for some truly hilarious mugging and scheming, for about thirty seconds at a time. But even the finest pot humor needs some kind of vaguely functional plot to ground it while it floats in the trees. "How High" doesn't have anything like that. All it has is herb and spark, and they ain't enough.

I don't get high. It's hard enough to keep my brain functioning properly that I don't need to put it out of commission on purpose. However, I like to watch movies about people who get high, because such movies are normally endlessly amusing. But I know I would need to smoke a truly mammoth amount of bud to enjoy this film, and I'm not prepared to go down that road. Instead, I'm just going to pump the song "How High" on the headphones and pretend this movie was all a dream, a dream that will eventually disappear from theatres like a puff of pungent white smoke soaring into the sky. You'd be well-advised to do the same.

EVERYBODY SING!

Look up in the sky, it's a bird, it's a plane!/It's the Funk Doctor Spock but this film is a stain/How bad?/So bad that it could rot my brain/Just rot my braaaaain!/Look up in the sky, it's a bird, it's a plane/It's the man Johnny Blaze, and it's a goddamned shame/How bad?/So bad it could drive me insane/Drive me insaaaaane!

But I still got to go interview them...

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