As the world unravels outside, dwindling supplies and cabin fever threaten to tear apart the friendships inside. Eventually, they are forced to leave the house, facing their fate and the true meaning of friendship and redemption.
The gang are pals with James Franco (obviously), who also plays himself, and they become trapped at a party at his house while a series of cataclysmic events happen around them in Los Angeles.
You could sit through a year's worth of Hollywood comedies and still not see anything that's genuinely knock-your-socks-off audacious. But This Is the End (opening June 12) truly is. It's the wildest screen comedy in a long time, and also the smartest, the most fearlessly inspired, and the snort-out-loud funniest. The movie opens with Seth Rogen at an airport, where a passerby says, ''Hey, Seth Rogen, what up, man?'' So you immediately know that he's going to be playing a version of himself. In fact, everyone in the film is playing a version of him-or herself.
Rogen picks up his buddy Jay Baruchel (who's less of a star than anyone here — a running gag), and after getting stoned, they head to a party at James Franco's house. Everyone from Jonah Hill to Emma Watson is there, and what transpires looks so much like what you'd expect a party with hip young actors and comedians to look like that it's as if we'd wandered into the ultimate episode of Entourage. The jockeying of movie-star egos, the drugs and sex (Michael Cera is the group's libertine nerd), Rogen and Franco brainstorming a sequel to Pineapple Express — it's all cheekily plausible.
Sinkholes are sucking people into infernos, but inside Franco's house, the movie-star self-absorption gets raised to an insane new pitch of competitive backbiting. The interplay is so fast and obscene that you feel like you're eavesdropping on the sorts of things comedians say to each other when they're off camera. Then Danny McBride shows up, tossing insults like cherry bombs, and the hilarity just grows more scandalous. This Is the End has great fun tweaking their public images, even as it's truly asking: Do people like this deserve to go to heaven or hell? The answer will crack you up and lift you up high.