Boys to men.(FILM)("Superbad")(Movie review)

THE day will come when Judd Apatow, instead of turning out shaggy, sidesplitting portraits of contemporary masculinity, finds himself directing a bad, big-budget sequel to a movie that wasn't all that great to begin with--Balls to the Wall 2, say, with Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson reprising their roles as dueling jai-alai players, or Wickeder Wickets: The Saga of Carruthers Carstairs Continues, starring Sacha Baron Cohen as a snobby-but-lovable croquet champion. The day will come when Seth Rogen, Apatow's frequent star, will stop playing hilarious manchildren and make a bid to become a "serious" actor--by taking a part as an angry, paraplegic Iraq War vet in Sean Penn's adaptation of Scott Thomas Beauchamp's first novel, perhaps, or as a racist cop who falls in love with a black transvestite migrant worker in Paul Haggis's 2012 Oscar-winner They're Gonna Wash Us Away, a searing look at race relations in post-Katrina New Orleans. The day will come when Michael Cera and Jonah Hill, the young headliners of the Apatow-produced, Rogen-written Superbad, get their own dreadful vanity projects--the former directing and starring in U.P., an art-house effort about a failed screenwriter who returns to his hometown in Michigan's Upper Peninsula to reconnect with his parents; the latter taking top billing in Jonah and the Whale, a relentlessly unfunny ABC sitcom costarring a gone-to-seed Britney Spears (but I repeat myself) as Hill's white-trash wife.

Never, you say? Ah, but it will--as surely as Harold Ramis went from helming Caddyshack to directing Analyze That; as surely as the Steve Martin of The Jerk become the Steve Martin of Cheaper by the Dozen; as surely as Steve Carell, so hilarious in The 40-Year-Old Virgin and The Office, will be appearing in this fall's Dan in Real Life, a glossy, "heartfelt" dramedy co-starring Juliette Binoche; as surely as Will Ferrell, the funniest man in America, felt the need to woo Nicole Kidman in the awful revision of Bewitched, or go dour and dramatic for semi-indie efforts like Stranger Than Fiction and Winter Passing; as surely as Robin Williams--well, need I say more?

I need not, I think, which is why audiences with a strong stomach for profanity, lechery, and general adolescent-male disgustingness should savor the Apatow-Rogen axis of funny while it lasts. Superbad, their latest collaboration--it's directed, with studious self-effacement, by one Greg Mottola, but it's an Apatow production all the way--is a modest movie, a variation on a well-worn theme: The awkward, virginal leads, Seth (the chunky, motormouthed Hill) and Evan (the long-limbed Cera, a master of the uncomfortable, deadpan murmur), face various obstacles in their quest to get drunk and get lucky before high school slouches to an end. But for all its familiarity, Superbad is more of a companion piece to Knocked Up and The 40-Year-Old Virgin than a retread of Porky's or American Pie. Apatow's comedies, David Denby wrote recently in The New Yorker, are elegies for "the dissolution ...