The Greek is a famous L.A. night spot, Aldous is a fallen rock star, Aaron is a desperate intern, Sergio is his psychotic boss and Get Him to the Greek is LOL after LOL and assures us that growing old might be mandatory but growing up is most definitely not.
Aaron works in the music industry and is given the task of collecting Aldous, a chemically enhanced rock star, from London, taking him to New York for a TV interview and getting him to the Greek in time for Aldous’ live concert. So it’s a road movie with altitude.
We first meet Aldous performing the fateful song that sent his career on its downward spiral and this debacle is followed by a most amusing TV interview that reminds us that celebrities might have money, talent and beauty, but they still screw up, just like us. We then leave Aldous and cut to the record company owned by Sergio, a verbal machine gun, who demands his terrorized staff feed him with new ideas. These scenes are brilliantly written and when we leave the office scenario it’s never as consistently funny again, but instead we are given a decadent display of human weakness and self-indulgence and left in no doubt that, to have that much fun, it really is worth risking everything.
All the characters gel but, although Sergio and Aldous appear together only a few times, there is a lot more chemistry between them than between Aaron and Aldous. It would have been electrifying to have placed Aldous in Sergio’s music company for the entire film and witnessed these two Titans clash time after time and such heady interaction could possibly have elevated Get Him to the Greek to the status of a comedy classic. But if this film does as well as it deserves, there’s bound to be a sequel, so who knows?
The story does flag at one point when the two guys become involved with Aaron’s girlfriend, well, actually, it’s his ex-girlfriend, but she doesn’t know this. At this point we also lose a little respect for Aaron when he crosses a line but he really is such a loveable guy we soon get over it. Also, the dilemma Aaron finds himself in at the end is really quite small – should Aldous go on stage or go to the hospital first to get treatment for his damaged arm? It gets a little cheesy when the previously ambitious Aaron decides to do the right thing.
Although taking the high moral ground is, of course, admirable, not every Hollywood film has to have a road to Damascus experience and seeing our hero drop his standards a tad so he gets to keep the money and the girl won’t mean he’s exactly depraved. I’m sure we all like to think we’d do the right thing but we also know we’d be sorely tempted not to, and seeing Aaron smudge fact with fiction so he could have it all would have made us laugh, and when we laugh it’s really just our soul saying….. ‘Ain’t that the truth?’
Starring: Russell Brand (Aldous), Jonah Hill (Aaron), Sean ‘P Diddy’ Comb (Sergio) Release date: 4th June, 2010
