Blu-ray Review: Superbad

THE MOVIE: 2 stars out of 5

From the press release that accompanied the disc, Superbad is brought to you by the guys who brought you Knocked Up and The 40 Year Old Virgin. In Superbad, Seth (Jonah Hill) and Evan (Michael Cera) want nothing more than to lose their virginity before they head off to college. To do that though, they need to get liquor for the big party that night. With the help of their friend Fogell, a.k.a McLovin (Christopher Mintz-Plasse), and his fake ID, the three of them go on a chase for the elusive booze, dodging incompetent cops (Knocked Up’s Seth Rogen and Saturday Night’s Bill Hader) while attempting to reverse a lifelong losing streak when it comes to women.

While this film received some critical praise when it was released to theaters and did well at the box office, I didn’t find it to be particularly funny or very engaging. The film is filled with almost nothing more that vulgarity, in fact one of the bonus features included with the disc is “Line-o-rama” which keeps a running total of the obscenities. The film included with the disc contains footage too raunchy to be shown in theaters, although I did not find it to be that much worse than the rest of the film. While a string of obscenities can be damn funny, I did not find these to be as they seemed to be included simply because they were obscenities rather than because they were witty. I must say that I was disappointed with the quality of the writing in this film. If you like totally sophomoric humor, you will love this film, if not, I can only rate it a rental at best.

THE VIDEO: 4 1/4 stars out of 5

Superbad is encoded with AVC and presented with an aspect ratio of 1:85:1. This is a solid transfer but not up to the level of recent Blu-Ray releases IMHO. While the image looks sharp, there is little depth to the image, with the image looking rather flat. Black levels look merely OK which may contribute to the flat appearance of the image. The color palette is also shifted to the orange, giving skin tones an orange look. I did not see this film in the theater but this looks like something that was deliberate on the part of the director and, frankly, detracts from rather than enhances the appearance of the image. Detail visible in the picture is also mediocre even thought the image appears sharp overall.

THE AUDIO: 4 stars out of 5

They're two high rez audio tracks presented with the film, a Dolby True HD track and a uncompressed PCM track. To these ears, both sounded identical. As one would expect with a comedy of this sort, the film is rather dialogue driven so there is little use of the surround channels through most of the film. Nevertheless, the fidelity of the dialogue and music is well done with an overall smooth and open sound. The dialogue in particular is well presented in the mix and easy to follow.

IN CONCLUSION

While this release has solid video and audio, I can only rate it as a rental. While it is solid, it is in no way outstanding in either respect and certainly not reference material.

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