Who's Reviews: Get Him to the Greek

A strange movie choice, you might say. Well, forced to choose Get Him to the Greek due to the fact that Lucifer and I missed the Prince of Persia session, we were slightly disappointed that we were not going to see chiseled, hairless Jake Gyllenhaal abs, but, rather, Russell Brand’s shock of hairy chest.

The movie is about Aldous Snow (Russell Brand) who is an English has-been rock star planning a comeback concert at the Greek Theatre in LA. Jonah Hill (the cute, chubby dude) plays Aaron Green who works for a record company and is responsible for getting Snow to the Greek Theatre in LA (hence the title of the movie). Of course, things do not run smoothly and in the process of getting Snow from London to LA via Las Vegas, hilarity ensues.

The movie opens with Aldous Snow’s video clip for African Child, a song which was named the 3^rd worst thing for African life (or something to that effect), losing only to “famine and war”. Yep. It’s bad. African stereotypes all round, truly nasty scenes (eg. Snow ‘giving birth’ to an African baby) and writhing, half-naked women galore. The rest of the movie is littered with references to today’s pop culture – there are cameos by Christina Aguilera, Mario Lopez, Pink, the list goes on.

Rose Byrne, plays Jackie Q, Snow’s former girlfriend and a big pop star in her own right. She is hilarious and also brings a bit of seriousness to the movie in the tokenistic ‘confrontation scene’ with Snow. The movie is also peppered with snippets of Jackie Q’s music videos which are hilarious tongue-in-cheek parodies of today’s sexed up female vocal artists.

But there are some truly hilarious moments. Diddy/Piddy/P. Diddy/Puff Daddy/Sean Combs (or whatever you call him these days) plays Aaron’s boss, Sergio (weird name, huh?!). He is a diluted version of Les Grossman in Tropic Thunder (note to all: YouTube Les Grossman. You will thank me later). Sergio’s on-going joke about mind f-ing people is quite funny, but after seeing the beauty that is Les Grossman, no-one can ever quite match that performance and I got the feeling that Diddy based a lot of his performance on Grossman.

Another hilarious scene is where Aaron takes a “Jeffrey” – a delightful concoction of every illicit drug known to man (coke, heroin, speed, weed etc). He goes MENTAL and let’s just say in the midst of the chaos, people stroke furry walls, someone gets whacked with a guitar, Aaron gets raped by an over-eager Pussycat Doll-wannabe and Sergio gets hit by a car.

Of course, there are the terrible, terrible cringe-worthy moments. For example, in one scene, Aldous Snow insists that Aaron hide a small bag of heroin in a very private place as they are going through airport security. The movie does not shy away from tasteless laughs such as this. There is another scene so contrived that I spent the whole time cringing and that is where Aaron’s girlfriend, Daphne, insists that she, Aaron and Snow have a… threesome. And. It. Actually. Happens. AWKWARD!

There is no denying that Get Him to the Greek is crass, overtly sexual and in-your-face. But Lucifer and I were surprisingly touched by the vulnerability Russell Brand managed to show towards the end of the movie – underneath all that hair is a truly sweet person (when he is sober) who is emotionally quite fragile. That aspect made the movie a little more enjoyable.

Get Him to the Greek gets a 6/10 from me, 6.5/10 from Lucifer. But for being surprisingly emotional and touching, and if we’re nicer, it’d be a 7/10.

~ Hurley Who?