I am not generally a big fan of Seth Rogen’s brand of humor but this title in particular was noted by a number of critics and the premise sounded. I suspected almost immediately that this was a mistake once I heard the faux accent Rogen adopts as an Eastern European of the early 20th century. It’s a sign that the film isn’t just not taking the subject matter seriously, it’s actively trying to mock and belittle everything. Sure enough this film turned out to be pretty much trash.

Herschel Greenbaum is a poor Jewish peasant in some undetermined Eastern European country who barely ekes out a living by digging ditches. He falls in love with an equally poor Jewish woman named Sarah, they marry and they emigrate to America. Soon after Sarah becomes pregnant however, Herschel falls into a vat of pickles in the pickle factory where he works and is presumed dead. A hundred years later he is discovered to have been perfectly preserved and revived. So Herschel emerges into present day Brooklyn and meets with Ben, his great grandson who looks exactly like him without the beard. At first their relationship is friendly as Ben, who is an app developer, tries to teach Herschel about the new world he finds himself in. But they are soon at odds once Herschel realizes that Ben has neglected the family grave site and left behind Judaism while Herschel’s combativeness gives both of them a criminal record and causes Ben’s app to fail. Herschel sets out to build a new pickle-making business in the present day to prove himself.

The preposterousness of the method by which Herschel arrives in the 21st century sets the tongue-in-cheek tone but even after making allowances for the sake of comedy, this is a remarkably stupid film. Herschel’s idea of the ultimate in luxury is seltzer water and so he is amazed to see that Ben has a soda making machine at home. When he has no money to hire staff to expand his artisanal pickle making business, a pair of social media influencers advise him to take on an army of unpaid interns and it works. When he becomes famous, Ben takes him down by tricking him into saying outrageously offensive things about Christianity in a live interview. None of this is funny and it’s not even clever. It’s really difficult to understand what kind of an audience would find this entertaining.

The thing about the particular brand of humor employed here is that it indiscriminately mocks and denigrates everything it touches. The one possible exception is Judaism as one of the lesser themes here is about Ben reconnecting with his family’s heritage but even here the film has Herschel espousing what is probably the most offensive representation of the religion possible. He makes fun of hipster culture, the tech industry, social media, even the stupidity of poor peasants. It valorizes nothing except perhaps Rogen’s own brilliance at coming up with all this and playing both characters. It makes me think of the comedies that I do like and I realized that the jokes in those are precisely targeted to only punch up. Even as the humor is used to bring down the high and mighty, they do have a heart and values that they believe in. By contrast, films like this paint the world as being filled only by assholes and so there is no reason to care about anything at all.

Anyway this is a trash tier film so you should stay away from it. It’s not funny, it’s not clever and most of all, it doesn’t believe in anything at all, not even in its pickles.