This is the End looks funny, and Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg are excellent screenwriters, and it stars a great cast which consists of every notable comic actor and institution of the last 10 years. However, everybody in it plays “themselves,” which is both so ironic it’s so longer ironic and almost as self-indulgent and oblivious to the audience as one of those movies where Adam Sandler dicks around Hawaii for 90 minutes.
It’s been done before, of course, actors playing themselves. No cameos here, though. I’m not talking Mike Tyson in The Hangover or Lance Armstrong in Dodgeball. I mean real-life stories portrayed by the person who actually lived them. Alternately, it’s silly and fun to have an actor play against type, and even more fun if they play that character as “themselves,” as if that wacky character is their real, off-screen persona.
