Review: 'The Night Before' lacks laughs

In "The Night Before," Seth Rogen attempts the first bros before ho, ho, hos comedy.

He plays Isaac, who tries, along with high-school buddies Chris (Anthony Mackie) and Ethan (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), to maintain a fraying tradition of spending Christmas Eve together, though Isaac now has a family and Chris is a famous pro athlete.

The odd dude out is Ethan, who has a botched music career and works on the fringes of the catering business, when he's not alone in his apartment moping about his breakup with Diana (Lizzy Kaplan), who dated him for reasons that are never made clear in the movie.

Isaac has a pregnant wife (Jillian Bell) and new priorities; Chris has new celebrity friends. But they humor Ethan with one more night on the town, and he repays them by scoring invitations to an infamous holiday party known as the Nutcracker Ball.

Along the way, Isaac pukes in a church and many f-bombs detonate, but "Night Before" is not the "Bad Santa" anti-yule black comedy promised by the TV ads.

It's also not funny, at least not very often.

Most of the gags involve Isaac on an extended drug trip. Rogen stretches here, going from the pothead we know (and sometimes love) to a guy who also binges on cocaine, mushrooms and other things I couldn't identify because slang terminology is used, and I no longer speak drug.

Mackie has little to do here, and Gordon-Levitt plays a simp - no job, no ambition, no personality. Ethan is the kind of inert, charmless bum who gives bro comedies a bad name. Much hangs on whether he will meet his girlfriend's parents. Why would they want to meet him?

"Night Before" bumps along in hit-or-miss fashion before finally locating the last refuge of the gag-starved comedy: celebrity cameos. These pay few dividends, but you do get laughs from Ilana Glazer in a small role. And Bell is always a welcome presence in movie comedy.

The one true standout, though, is Michael Shannon, making a rare comic turn as a pot-dealing angel, a character amusingly cribbed from "A Christmas Carol" and "It's a Wonderful Life."

He gives our leads the marijuana of Christmas Past, Present and Future.

All is calm.

All is bright.

If the studio is on the ball, I expect weed with the "Night Before" label to be on sale this Christmas in Colorado.

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