Seth Rogen, clad in a Star of David sweater, is tripping on mushrooms while out gallivanting with his two buddies on Christmas Eve. Before he leaves home, his pregnant wife provides him with a small box full of drugs. So it’s only natural according to the logic of dumb comedies that, after wandering away from buddies Joseph Gordon Levitt and Anthony Mackie, Rogen will end up on the steps of the very church his wife is ready to take in Christmas Eve mass with her parents. She notices he’s tripping his brains out (he’s also carrying a mast he just removed from a nativity scene) and tries to shoo him away before the parents arrive. Instead he stumbles into the crowded church with them. What results is the movie’s funniest scene that doesn’t contain Michael Shannon.
Shannon, so recently brilliant as a conniving real estate honcho in 99 Homes, comes into The Night Before with a 180-degree departure from that character in playing a hilarious philosophical drug dealer who our partying boys know from high school. In what would’ve been a barely passable gross-out comedy without him, this film directed by Jonathan Levine (the underrated 50/50) is actually saved by Shannon’s remarkable performance.
Although often annoying (the three dudes somehow, after becoming separated and without any communication with each other, suddenly show up simultaneously at the same subway station), The Night Before contains just enough funny moments to keep itself from the spoiled eggnog designation. It channels that classic of Christmas dark comedy, Bad Santa, enough to keep itself from disintegrating under its own gooey faults. Had Levine the gumption to not sell out and go wide-eyed sentimental, we may have really had something here. As is, it’s a passable stocking stuffer of a film that if it had followed its edginess, could have been a far more memorable goody bag.