Plot Goes To Pot In Disappointing `Half Baked'
------------------------------------------------------------------ Movie review
X "Half Baked," with Dave Chappelle, Harland Williams. Directed by Tamra Davis, from a script by Chappelle and Neal Brennan. 85 minutes. Several theaters. "R" - Restricted because of drug content, language, nudity. ------------------------------------------------------------------
It's tempting to use that title as a capsule summary, but it doesn't tell the whole story. "Half Baked" isn't baked at all.
Talk about your single-minded comedies. Even Cheech and Chong delivered more variety than this thin tale of pot-puffing morons and the scheme three of them cook up when the fourth lands in prison.
Harland Williams plays the unlucky one. He's been sexually threatened in the jail shower by another prisoner, and his only protector will be released in a few days. Unless his friends (Dave Chappelle, Jim Breuer, Guillermo Diaz) can bail him out by selling the weed they've stolen from a pharmaceutical lab, he'll become a jail-rape casualty.
That's not much to keep a plot spinning, and Chapelle and his fellow screenwriter, Neal Brennan, come up with only a few cute ideas to keep the script afloat.
There's a survey of the motives of secret pot smokers - a father puffing for inspiration to communicate with his son, a grandmother who clearly does it for fun - and some pointed jokes about marijuana's reputation as both a gateway drug ("to junk food," says Chappelle) and an addictive substance (Chappelle attends a drug rehab meeting and learns rather graphically about the difference between hard drugs and marijuana).
This is probably the most aggressively pro-weed movie since Cheech and Chong's "Up in Smoke" two decades ago. It includes cameos by Willie Nelson, Steven Wright and Janeane Garofolo that amount to pot endorsements. Universal Pictures is promoting the picture as "hilariously subversive" and "politically incorrect at every turn."
But like those moralistic old Hollywood movies that got around the Production Code by pretending to sober up after an hour and a half of enthusiastic sin, "Half Baked" delivers an anti-pot message at the end. Sort of.
All it's really saying is that, given the choice between pot and sex, Chappelle's character will always choose the latter. But with a girlfriend named Mary Jane, how long can this last? And how many variations on "I've got a date with Mary Jane" can an audience take?