15, 108 mins
Our national tarnished treasure Russell Brand — the comedian who once exposed himself in My Booky Wook — is now hitting the summer multiplexes with his Movie Wovie, another cocktail of naked ambition on drugs.
The film is officially and puzzlingly titled Get Him to the Greek, which refers not to a moussaka restaurant but the Greek Theatre in Los Angeles, where Brand, as the British rock star Aldous Snow, is due to perform. Aldous’s record company has decided to revive his clapped-out career with a tenth-anniversary show. It is the job of the long-suffering, pudgy, straight man Aaron (Jonah Hill) to get Aldous from London to LA alive — even if egregiously stoned.
If there’s one thing Brand can do, it’s sell his own brand, and he draws on his younger, dopier self for Aldous Snow, first seen as the titular Sarah’s new love interest in the forgettable Forgetting Sarah Marshall. Now sober, Brand says he watched old footage of himself on drugs to get the glassy-eyed look just right, but that’s possibly the extent of his acting here. Fortunately, he’s naturally funny.
The film opens with an hilarious scene of Aldous in a hot, war-torn country singing African Child, his charity single that flopped on grounds of unerring bad taste. In gold leather crotch-crushing trousers, with a bare chest flashing under white robes and a Christ-like hairdo, Aldous says coyly: “That’s for other people to say, if they think I’m a Space Jesus.” In the run-up to African Child, Aldous has traded in heroin for yoga, so when he falls off the wagon it’s spectacular. No potion goes unconsumed on this journey, from absinthe to “the Geoffrey”.
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The Geoffrey is a cinematic milestone comparable to the Camberwell Carrot, the iconic giant spliff in the film Withnail and I. The more advanced Geoffrey is a fat roll-up containing narcotics from E to H, via crack cocaine; a layered experience of highs and paranoia, which nearly destroys the once-innocent Aaron. The corruption of Aaron is a mainstay of the thin story — he was once a normal record-company employee, but Aldous leads him to Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and worse.
We’ve all seen the clapped-out rock star road movie a million times, and this is from the stable of the producer Judd Apatow, who knocks out a laddish comedy to huge box office almost every year. What’s missing in Get Him to the Greek is a plot — another girl, another drug-fuelled planet is the extent of the sozzled-to-sober trajectory.
There is something terribly retro about the 35-year-old Brand, an old-fashioned rocker with chains and leather that look as if they came from the wardrobe of Marc Bolan. Unfortunately he cannot sing, and the movie’s home-made music is a real downer.
There are, however, some great vignettes, particularly the unexpected acting talent of P. Diddy or Puffy or Sean Combs as he presently is. He is outrageous as the record company boss Sergio, who specialises in psychotic bollockings and lectures on the art of mindf***ing.
All the women in this parodically sexist film are dumb, willing and mostly naked, apart from Aaron’s doctor girlfriend, played by the heavenly Elisabeth Moss — the career-girl Peggy Olsen in Mad Men. Her performance of gappy-toothed sweetness turned bitter makes you quite desperate for her to be given a whole script to herself.