Half-Baked has cooked up box-office business by using ingredients proven to tempt teen tastes: sex, drugs and rock-n-roll. It’s a recipe for parental indigestion.
A ’90s answer to Cheech and Chong, this movie is a reckless tribute to marijuana. The comedy opens with a flashback to the mid-1980s as four high school freshmen share their first joint. “We remember that day,” one fondly recalls, “when we met the fifth member of our crew—marijuana.” Flash forward. Now “mature” adults, the friends are unmotivated stoners in dead-end jobs who live from high to high and philosophize about music videos. And they’re loving every minute of it. The plot involves three of them trying to get the fourth out of jail.
In addition to glorifying pot, the movie gives viewers a crash course in the subculture. How to find weed. How to smoke weed. How to identify different types of users. Half-Baked is a gateway to a gateway drug.
“All these characters’ problems are started because of, and solved by, weed,” writer/star Dave Chappelle told Vibe magazine. “Baked could be viewed as pretty socially irresponsible, but it’s not a training film for children; it’s for adults.” If that’s true, why has Universal Pictures been advertising it on MTV?
Not only do these “heroes” consume pot, but they also steal it and sell it. Furthermore, Half-Baked‘s obscenities, nudity, homosexual references and shameful sexual conduct only aggrevate an already contemptible premise.
