Stick-thin, pale and seemingly unaware of what buttons do, English comic Russell Brand looks more like a classic rock star than any real ones currently do. All hips and lascivious proprieties, he struts, pouts and schoolboy smiles his way through Get Him to the Greek, a middling comic romp that serves as a spin-off of sorts to the 2008 romantic comedy Forgetting Sarah Marshall. Brand’s rock star, Aldous Snow, has fallen off the wagon and into the doldrums – a monumentally self-indulgent single, 'African Child', and the end of his long-term relationship with pop star Jackie Q (Rose Byrne, doing a wicked riff on Posh Spice) have ushered him into addiction and luxurious semi-retirement.
His hopeful saviour is Los Angeles record company cubicle jockey Aaron Green (Jonah Hill, playing a different character to his obsequious waiter from Forgetting Sarah Marshall), who convinces record company boss Sergio Roma (rap impresario Sean 'Puffy' Combs) that the 10th anniversary of a famous show at Los Angeles’ Greek Theatre by Snow’s band, Infant Sorrow, is the perfect way to re-launch his career and get his back catalog selling.
Brand and Hill look like a post-modern Laurel and Hardy when they’re together and much of the comic grist for the story, written and directed by Sarah Marshall director Nicholas Stoller, is in their antics. Aldous plays with Aaron at first, refusing to fly to New York for a pre-gig television interview and instead carousing in London. Brand’s charm is to suggest simultaneously that he has no idea what is going on and to be ahead of the game – you’re not quite sure which way he’ll go at any given moment. Hill is an everyman who can’t help flail aggressively as he fails; the funniest things he says are often the final, muttered asides at the end of a doomed dialogue (he has a classic encounter with Tom Felton, Harry Potter’s Draco Melfoy and one of a number of tart celebrity turns, in a London club).
The film, a shambolic race westward, is amusing, but the two leads could actually have played it sharper. Almost as soon as they meet, despite the ludicrous situations which culminate in a hotel suite riot in Las Vegas, a redemptive tone is at work. Aaron must realise that he cannot live Aldous’ wild life – he has a medical student girlfriend, Daphne (Elisabeth Moss), back in L.A. – and the rocker must in turn confess the vacuity of a life defined by drugs. Like the most recent film of producer Judd Apatow, Funny People, Get Him to the Greek takes the struggle of the commercial artist to be true to himself and the public deeply seriously and values nothing more highly than the bond of male friendship (after all his mishaps, Aaron is only truly freaked out when Aldous suggests a threesome with Daphne and she agrees).
To get where he predictably wants to end the story, Stoller has to conveniently change the rules several times – the importance of Aldous and Jackie’s son, Naples, changes from act to act in a rather uncaring manner. The biggest clue as to how this is a missed opportunity, how it could have been great rather than merely good, is that the standout moments are nominally peripheral: Byrne’s hilarious Jackie Q video clips, the Sarah Marshall sighting, Combs’ bravura, the droll cameo by Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich as Jackie’s latest boyfriend. The verses are better than the chorus.
