Get Him to the Greek

GET HIM TO THE GREEK

** SPOILERS **

Aldous Snow, the rock star Russell Brand played in Forgetting Sarah Marshall was probably its most interesting character.  Brand and his filmmakers obviously thought so too, and they went to the Aldous Snow well a second time, which is once too often it turns out.  Get Him to the Greek is a Sarah Marshall spinoff about Brand, but for some reason, Jonah Hill, who was Brand's sycophantic suck up stalker in Sarah Marshall, plays an entirely different character in Greek. (Kristin Bell appears in a cameo as Sarah Marshall, starring in her new show "Blind Medicine". Confusing? Not really. Just odd.) In Get Him to the Greek, Hill (As a fan, I say this out of concern, Jonah: please drop some weight) is a struggling music exec working for P. Diddy (not playing P. Diddy) who comes up with a plan to have the disgraced and in dire straits rock star Brand perform an anniversary concert at the Greek theater in LA. Hill has 72 hours to get Brand from London to that concert in LA, with pit stops in New York and Las Vegas. There's some good raunchy comedy in the first half of the movie as Hill flies to London and ends up indoctrinated in Brand's world of sex, drugs and rock & roll. Plenty of puke on Hill's face jokes result. The re-introduction of Aldous Snow that opens the picture is a righteous skewering of rock star folly and excess VH1: Behind the Music-style. But the more we get to know Brand and learn about his deadbeat, opportunistic father (Colm Meaney) and his ex, a shockingly thin Rose Byrne, the mother of his child (or so he thinks) and a fellow pop star who's now sleeping with Lars Ulrich, the dark underbelly of Get Him to the Greek kills off the good times. The comedy all but disappears by the third act. Diddy yells all his dialogue under the mistaken impression that yelling = funny. A three way scene between Brand, Hill, and Hill's doctor girlfriend Elizabeth Moss is neither funny nor sexy; just awkward and off putting.  I hate to say it but in the end, I felt like the best thing to do would be Forgetting Aldous Snow.