Get Him to the Greek is no masterpiece. There are too many shots of Jonah Hill vomiting, two too many jokes about Jonah Hill getting violated (by which I mean both of them are gratuitous and tasteless), one too many episodes of Hill being sent to buy heroin, a chemistryless relationship between Jonah Hill and Elizabeth Moss, and a reference to Forgetting Sarah Marshall that would be fine except for the fact that it makes us remember that Hill plays two different characters in that movie and this, making true continuity impossible.
But there's much more about the movie that's good than that's bad, and despite its occasional discomforts, it's well worth a watch. Given much more room to build a character, and as promising a character as Aldous Snow, Brand is just wonderful. He's a plausible object of Hill's worship and sacrifice, a man whose charisma, newly rediscovered for a Today Show audience, or fully on display for a stadium audience, outweighs his sometimes loathsome behavior. He's struggling to be a good father despite having a fairly miserable one himself (an everything-goes-wrong-at-once sequence featuring the two of them, Hill, and Diddy is a debauched high point of the movie). He may be having as much sex as possible, but he seems to be a reasonably considerate lover, and to have been genuinely attached to his long-time girlfriend. I really want to see Brand in a fully-realized role outside this one. Because while he's clearly drawing on his own wild past here, he puts a lot into individual scenes and individual moments, and I think he's capable of building roles without personal resonance.
But then, we already knew that Brand had potential. Far and away the surprise of the movie is Sean Combs. Who knew that the way for the dude to establish himself as a serious acting talent was to embrace patent ridiculousness? He's consistently hilarious riffing on his own outsized personality throughout the movie, but he's good enough to invest a scene about searching for string cheese while preparing to watch Biggest Loser with his kids with humor I certainly would never have found in it on my own. I really hope he takes the lesson from this, and does more comedy, as opposed to say, moving from A Raisin in the Sun into August Wilson adaptations, or something. That'd be upsetting.
In contrast, the movie did nothing to lessen my discomfort about Jonah Hill. It's yet another role for him where he's playing basically a weak personality, someone who lets himself be lead along because he has no actual ideas for how he ought to be living his own life. He and Moss have absolutely no sexual chemistry, and it's not remotely clear what ever bound their relationship together in the first place. By the end of the movie, he's moved to Seattle for her career, perhaps the only time an Apatowian hero has made that much of a sacrifice for a woman, although he gets to be a rock star's producer in exchange, so it's not really a sacrifice. I sometimes feel it's fruitless to keep focusing on the rank sexism that infects the Apatow universe and its offshoots, because there's no indication that a) it'll ever change, or b) there's any disincentive for the folks working in that universe to move beyond it. But there's no question that the women in these movies deserve more in ever conceivable way: better writing, better plotlines, better partners.