Al Shearer (left) in "How High."

MOVIE INFORMATION

With 10 as a must-see, we give this film a: Stars: Redman, Method Man Director: Jesse Dylan Rated: Rated R for profanity, violence, nudity, drug use Length: 93 minutes

ROCHESTERCRITIQUE

Having seen this film, how would you rate it? 10 5 9 4 8 3 7 2 6 1

By Marshall Fine
Gannett News Service

(December 21, 2001) -- The spirits of Cheech and Chong are alive and well in the suddenly fertile genre of the rap-stoner comedy.

But here's the problem: Cheech and Chong were actual comedians. Some rappers are not; though they're willing to play the fool, they lack that '70s comedy team's instinct for ad-libbed punch lines.

Case in point: How High, which teams rappers Method Man (real name: Clifford Smith) and his pal Redman (real name: Reggie Noble) as the 21st century answer to Cheech and Chong. While both are eager, confident performers, neither really has the comedy chops to transform weak material into something else.

Thanks to a script by Dustin Lee Abraham, How High is actually quite a bit funnier than the recently released "Not Another Teen Movie." But that's pretty faint praise.

Method Man plays Silas, a pot dealer who grows his own merchandise -- and who actually has a gift for botany. He's able to isolate strains of cannabis to sharpen the plant's medicinal properties for different ailments and sells it as such.

When his best friend, Ivory (Chuck Davis), dies suddenly, Silas uses Ivory's cremated remains as fertilizer for one of his plants and then decides he'll smoke the new strain just before he goes to take his scholastic aptitude test.

In the parking lot of the testing center, Silas meets Jamal (Redman), who is also there to take the test; he's been sent by his mother, who is disgusted by the fact that her son has, so far, spent six years in a two-year college. The pair is a match made in heaven; Silas has the weed but no rolling papers, while Jamal has papers, but nothing to smoke in them.

Together they imbibe the Ivory-laced plant and immediately conjure the ghost of Ivory, who tells them he has all the answers for the test and plans to help them. They wind up with perfect scores and become the object of college recruiters' attention, eventually choosing Harvard.

They are, naturally, the only freshmen with what used to be known as b-boy style on the entire campus. The rest of the film is about how this pair learns to play the system at the white-bread Ivy League school, where black studies is taught by ultra-WASP Spalding Gray and the new guys' nemesis is an uptight black yuppie dean (Obba Babatunde), who immediately stereotypes the fresh freshmen as gangstas.

Rap culture has so thoroughly permeated the mainstream that it only seems natural in this film that the other freshman imitate these two, rather than being intimidated by them. Their plain-spoken approach to life and pot-fueled sense of fun are the norm, rather than the extreme.

But the humor here is less hit than miss. The best of it is derived from the turnabout notion of hopelessly white people mouthing street argot in futile attempts to be with it.

The least successful attempts at humor spring from the idea that smoking a joint is the answer to any problem.

Method Man and Redman profess platitudes about making the most of your opportunities near the end of How High. But given the fact that they've just turned a school awards banquet into a weed jamboree, it's a hard message to take seriously.