Review: Half Baked (1998)

Half Baked (1998)

Rated R for pervasive drug content, language, nudity and sexual material

Score: 2 out of 5

The biggest problem I had with Half Baked, a problem that I imagine I'd have with a lot of other old stoner comedies from my childhood and earlier, has nothing to do with the film itself. It has a great cast comprised of comic actors from that period at the top of their game, most notably a young Dave Chappelle, who co-wrote the film with his future Chappelle's Show collaborator Neal Brennan. It has quite a few moments that got some good chuckles out of me, and overall, it should've worked.

No, the problem became clear as I was walking back to my car from a 25th anniversary 4/20 screening by the Laughing Gas Film Festival at the Classic Gateway Theater in Fort Lauderdale. Between the theater doors and the parking lot behind the building was a street where I walked by a medical marijuana dispensary and, further down, spotted a sticker on the wall with a QR code for a "420 Company". This may sound counterintuitive, the kind of idea that one would think you'd have to be high to come up with, but I believe that the process of destigmatizing and, in many parts of the country, outright legalizing cannabis use has ironically made it harder to enjoy stoner humor. A lot of these movies were counterculture flicks made during the War on Drugs, a time when weed was taboo and flatly illegal and could get you thrown in prison for years if you were caught with it. People who smoked it thus had an aura of rebellious cool, and stoner imagery, be it from hippies or hip-hop, was an easy way to mark yourself as a free thinker who didn't live by the silly rules that mainstream society wanted to impose. A film like Scary Movie could just throw in a stoner character where the whole joke is that he smokes a ton of weed, and score plenty of cheap laughs from the mere mention of illegal substances.

Unfortunately, that whole attitude doesn't work in an era where the taboos surrounding cannabis have largely broken down and the War on Drugs, particularly the prohibition of marijuana, faces growing mainstream pushback. Even here in a fairly conservative state like Florida that's legalized its medicinal use but has kept its recreational use criminalized, it's not hard to get a prescription for it. People who still define themselves as pot smokers are no longer considered cool, but fairly cringy in a society where "stoner culture" is just normal grown-up pop culture and suburban parents (at least in more liberal states) casually smoke weed the way they drink wine, with Neighbors nine years ago probably being, in my opinion, the canonical snapshot of how that attitude was changing in real time. The victory of the pro-legalization side of the argument meant that time was not kind to movies like Half Baked in which most of the joke revolves around how wacky and edgy marijuana and the people who smoke it are. It's oddly appropriate that this film stars Chappelle and Jim Breuer, two '90s/'00s Gen-X comedians who, to put it as nicely as possible, have not aged gracefully in the last several years, because this movie suffers from a lot of the same problems that they do. If I were born maybe ten years earlier and saw this film when I was in college, I imagine it would still be a nostalgic classic for me, as it is for a lot of people who were college kids and twentysomethings in the Y2K era. But watching it for the first time now, in 2023, I often found myself bored and waiting for the film to get to the point.

The plot is mostly an excuse to get to the pot. Chappelle plays Thurgood, a janitor at a pharmaceutical laboratory whose favorite pastime is getting high with his friends Kenny, Brian, and Scarface. When Kenny gets arrested while out on a munchie run that ends with him accidentally killing a police horse, he's held in prison on $1 million bail, forcing Thurgood, Brian, and Scarface to find a way to get him out. Their solution arrives when Thurgood discovers that the lab he works at is doing research into medicinal marijuana and has a huge stash of extremely high-quality pot, which inspires him to steal some of it from the lab so that he and his friends can sell it on the street and raise money for Kenny's bail. There are subplots involving Thurgood falling in love with a staunchly anti-drug woman ironically named Mary Jane, a drug kingpin named Samson who wants a cut of the protagonists' action when he finds out what they're doing, and an old inmate known only as the Squirrel Master (played by Tommy Chong) protecting Kenny from prison rape, but most of the film is a parade of drug humor and celebrity cameos from the likes of Willie Nelson, Snoop Dogg, and a pre-Daily Show Jon Stewart as some of the people who buy weed from Thurgood and his friends. Again, I outlined my problem with a lot of this humor earlier: a lot of it is dependent on the assumption that smoking cannabis is a daring, dangerous, and inherently funny thing to do, an idea that was pretty much dead and buried five years ago when Elon Musk, one of the wealthiest men alive and nobody's idea of a radical (no matter how much he likes to pretend otherwise), smoked a blunt with Joe Rogan live on the latter's top-rated podcast. It's like a 2000s Seltzer and Friedberg "reference movie" that, instead of using the protagonists' intoxication as the setup for greater escapades, mistakes weed references for weed humor.

If the humor doesn't click, then the film needs to have a real story to fall back on, which it unfortunately doesn't. Samson's villainy is only introduced in the third act to up the stakes with little foreshadowing, the film lost interest in Mary Jane around that same point and only wrapped up the story of her relationship with Thurgood at the very end, Kenny's only role in the film is to serve up jokes about prison rape, and overall, it just felt aimless and easily sidetracked, the kind of movie where wondering if Chappelle and Brennan were high when they wrote it isn't a compliment. Even at just 82 minutes, its runtime felt padded with extra scenes that didn't move the story along, flesh out the characters, or make me laugh all that much beyond just a few chuckles. It felt like a "sketch movie", the kind of movie that a lot of sketch comedy stars and writers in the '90s made in which they took popular characters from their shows and gave them a feature film to bumble around in, whether or not the material was suited to more than a short sketch. This movie may not have been adapted from anything out of Saturday Night Live, MADtv, or anywhere else, but Chappelle and Brennan's past and future in stand-up and late night comedy was clearly visible here, and in this case, those talents didn't translate to the big screen.

The Bottom Line

The title really says it all: Half Baked feels, well, half-baked, like it needed way more time spent on the plot instead of packing in as many "edgy" weed references as they could. It's a film that I'd argue is kept alive chiefly by Gen-X/millennial nostalgia and Chappelle's later success causing his fans to rediscover it, as it has lost its edge over the years.