Whoa, the Apocalypse. We’re Still Buds

This Is the End” — in more ways than one. The premise of Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg’s new movie — a foul-mouthed, good-natured “Funny or Die” sketch stretched to feature length and garnished with special effects — is that the apocalypse is here. As a bunch of funny guys gather at a party in Los Angeles, events foretold in the Book of Revelation come to pass. The righteous are raptured up to heaven, while the rest (or at least most of the famous people in Hollywood) are swallowed up in fiery pits that open up in the ground, or pursued by scaly, oily, horned demons with enormous genitals.

The end of the world is a hot topic at the movies these days, and there is no shortage of commentary linking this trend to anxiety about global warming, economic crisis, overconsumption and other scary real-life phenomena. But the allegorical significance of “This Is the End” may lie closer to home, in the creative exhaustion of its makers and the popular, profitable strain of humor they represent. The film, at its phoned-in worst and also at its riotous best, has a terminal feeling. It suggests that a comic subgenre based on the immaturity, sexual panic and self-mocking tendencies of men who should be old enough to know better has reached its expiration date.

This is not to say that there will be no more movies in which a bunch of dudes smoke weed, crack wise and give voice to their blatant terror of women and their covert homoerotic longings. As long as those things keep happening in the world, they will find expression in movies and on television. But maybe with diminishing insight and increasing cynicism. “The Hangover Part III,” which recently wrapped up the least self-aware, most lucrative cycle of contemporary man-child comedies, is already a zombie, a brain-dead thing kept in frenzied motion by autonomic reflexes and instinctive appetites, mostly for your money.

“This Is the End” is quite a bit better than “The Hangover Part III,” and in places it is genuinely, even sublimely hilarious. Why shouldn’t it be? It assembles a talented, quick-tongued bunch of performers and happily dispenses with the pretense that they are playing anything other than themselves. The fake-doc aesthetic that rules so much television these days is used to witty effect as we are invited to hang out with Mr. Rogen, James Franco and some other famous pals, whose lives turn out to be exactly what we might have expected, based on some of their earlier movies.

Seth — I’ll dispense with honorifics when referring to the characters; we’re all buds around here — is insecure and eager to please. James is a little on the pretentious side, which kind of bothers Jay (Baruchel), who has come to California to visit Seth. Their friendship stretches back to younger days in Canada, and Jay doesn’t really get along with the Hollywood crowd Seth has been running with since his career took flight under the wing of Judd Apatow. Nonetheless, after a blissful, bro-y day spent getting high and playing video games, Seth drags Jay to a party at James’s house, which serves as a Brueghel-esque tableau of modern celebrity. There’s Rihanna! And Paul Rudd! Jason Segel! Michael Cera!

Also Jonah (Hill) and Craig (Robinson), who, along with Jay, Seth and James, make up a hardy band of survivors when the divine wrath really hits the fan. They are joined eventually by Danny (McBride) and Emma (Watson), who is around long enough to make you realize that the Harry Potter movies were basically a British version of “Freaks and Geeks” and to raise a question that has been burning up the Internet for years: can rape jokes ever be funny?

“This Is the End” suggests that they can at least sometimes be harmless, and as crude as the movie’s humor often is, its spirit is sweet, sensitive and innocuous. In their script for “Superbad,” Mr. Rogen and Mr. Goldberg zeroed in on the tenderness and vulnerability that lie at the heart of male friendship, and here they go even further, using the prospect of global annihilation as an occasion for some touchy-feely relationship workshopping.

The engine driving the plot — apart from the biblical apocalypse, which is as literal a deus ex machina as you could wish for — is Jay’s jealousy. He resents Seth’s new friends, and perhaps also his greater success. Once the two of them are locked in James’s gaudy, modernist Hollywood mansion, this issue continues to simmer, and is intensified by the personality quirks of the other survivors. Craig’s moodiness, Jonah’s passive-aggressive tendencies, James’s arrogance and Danny’s jovial lack of consideration cause friction that is, notwithstanding the fireballs and murderous demons, quite realistic. So, in a way, are the squabbles that ensue, including an angry debate between James and Danny on the ethics of ejaculating on someone else’s stuff.

That conversation — which made me laugh louder than just about anything since the naked wrestling match in “Borat” — may be a metaphor for the rivalry and intimacy that bond youngish, Y-chromosome-endowed actors and comedians these days. But a deeper and more troubling metaphor may be the house itself, which represents the limitations of an insular, exclusive and increasingly self-cannibalizing comic imagination. The problem is not that Seth and Jay and the rest are still rolling joints and trying out naughty material on one another in the comfort of their ever-larger and plusher homes. The problem is that they seem to be motivated, more and more, by professional duty and brand awareness. Solipsism has turned into shtick, and their childish interest in themselves betrays a confining lack of curiosity about anything else.

I think they know it’s time to move on, and “This Is the End” is both a protest against, and an acknowledgment of, this reality. Mr. Rogen and Mr. Goldberg — and their on-screen co-conspirators and alter egos — would rather blow up the whole world than grapple with the existence of women, children, death, politics, responsibility, homosexuality and other fertile subjects for laughter. But I’m confident that eventually they will deal with all of it. They’re good boys, much as they like to pretend otherwise.