Reviews...

Judd Apatow's Knocked Up is the funniest film of the summer, finds Sukhdev Sandhu

Drizzle, rain, floods. England losing the Test series. Big Brother and pretty much everything on television. Really, it's been a dismal summer. Cinema's not been much help: even a great film such as The Bourne Ultimatum is hardly a barrel of laughs. Thank goodness, then, for Knocked Up.

Seth Rogen and Paul Rudd in Judd Apatow's Knocked Up
Tender humour: Seth Rogen and Paul Rudd in Judd Apatow's Knocked Up

Judd Apatow's follow-up to The 40-Year-Old Virgin is snort-all-over-the-person-in-front-of-you funny, hand-over-mouth filthy, and as exhilarating as inhaling from a 10-ton oxygen tank. It leaves you wanting to race out and repeat its wittiest lines and absurdest conceits to all your friends.

All from the simplest premise: boy and girl sleep together, girl gets pregnant, panic ensues. Boy is pretty much the right word for Ben Stone (Seth Rogen): he's a paunchy, curly-haired slacker, an illegal resident from Canada who lives off accident compensation and spends his time smoking weed and goofing around with his idiot pals, with whom he has hatched a plan to become a new-media entrepreneur.

Their plan? To create a website that tells users the precise moment in a movie that their favourite film stars get naked. The upside of this plan is that they spend a lot of quality time with Denise Richards DVDs; the downside is that they enjoy it so much they never get any work done.

Somehow, one night, Ben manages to pull Alison (Katherine Heigl, of Grey's Anatomy), a Kim Wilde-lookalike who works on a TV entertainment show and seems to occupy a totally different social and beauty league from him. Eight weeks later, and seven weeks and six days after she has had anything to do with him, the bombshell drops, and they both have to figure out whether or not they really like each other, and how to prepare for parenthood.

Knocked Up draws on many of the different forms of film comedy that have been popular over the last decade: American Pie gross-out; Chasing Amy-style potty-mouthed losers in love; suburbanites in a rut à la Little Children; hell-raising-in-Vegas escapades that recall Swingers.

Writer and director Apatow knows these films, and lots more, too: as Alison is about to give birth, Ben's friends are in wheelchairs outside, bashing into each other in re-enactments of Murderball, the quadriplegic-basketball documentary.

The characters are as gabby as any in a Tarantino movie. A recurring joke has them teasing one of their number who has grown a beard: he's compared to Charles Manson, Chewbacca, the late John Lennon, Martin Scorsese in his cocaine period, Ben's rabbi, a returnee from the Burning Man festival, shoe-bomber Richard Reid, and, most brilliantly of all, Robin Williams's knuckles.

But Apatow's gift, seen as early as the US TV show Freaks and Geeks, of which he was executive producer, is for marrying belly laughs to tenderness.

He has an instinctive feeling for those people Jarvis Cocker called "misshapes", the gauche and unpretty with hearts of near-gold. Rather than playing up Alison and Ben as another Beauty and the Beast (easy enough: she's slim, he's a porker; she's peppy, he's sardonic; she makes TV, he slumps in front of it), he highlights her vulnerabilities, and the way she looks to other people for advice and comfort too.

Her main confidante is sister Debbie (Leslie Mann), a pinched suburban mom who's obsessed with getting old and paedophiles nabbing her kids. Her glass-half-empty outlook, and the chokehold she exerts on those around, drives her husband Pete (a delightful Paul Rudd) to hanker after the innocence of youth: "I wish I liked anything as much as my kids love bubbles."

But Apatow makes even Debbie's cattiness sad rather than vicious, revealing her need to be loved during a terrific spat with a bouncer who himself admits his distaste for the pro-skinny-teens policy his club enforces.

Rogen, who in Freaks and Geeks seemed to have problems saying even "hello" without imbuing it with gruff sarcasm, has softened with age.

His character is still a bit of an idiot, but he's also more than just a mouthpiece for gags and one-liners. His awkwardness around Alison, his desire to amuse her and to live up to her almost baffling faith in him is real and touchingly palpable: "Don't f*** me over," she warns him early on. "I'm the guy who girls f*** over," he replies.

Surprisingly under-emphasised in most American coverage of the film has been its casual and almost insouciant treatment of abortion. Alison's mother talks of "taking care of" the situation, and mentions a friend who had an abortion before later giving birth to a "real baby". But the couple themselves never act as if that's an option: is that because it would slow down the story, or because Apatow doesn't want to offend the pro-life constituency?

Ignore anyone who tells you Knocked Up is only for adolescent boys; it has an equal-opportunities brashness topped up with scratchy charm and an incisive wisdom. And Haircut 100 on the soundtrack.

Who could resist that?