Mac & Devin Go to High School Blu-ray Review

Posted July 9th, 2012 by Brandon A. DuHamel

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Aspect Ratio: 1.78:1
Video Codec: AVC/MPEG-4
Resolution: 1080p/24 (23.976Hz)
Audio Codec: English Dolby TrueHD 5.1 (48kHz/24-bit)
Subtitles: N/A
Subtitles Color: N/A
Region: A (Region-Locked)
Rating: R
Run Time: 75 Mins.
Discs: 1 (1 x Blu-ray)
Studio: Anchor Bay Entertainment
Blu-ray Release Date: July 3, 2012
List Price: $24.99

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Overall

The Film

Video Quality

Audio Quality

Supplemental Materials

Click thumbnails for high-resolution 1920X1080p screen captures

(All Blu-rayDefinition.com screen captures are lightly compressed with lossy JPEG at 100% quality setting and are meant as a general representation of the content. They do not fully reveal the capabilities of the Blu-ray format)

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The Film

In the pantheon of stoner flicks, Mac & Devin Go to High School has to be somewhere near the bottom of the class. This comedy vehicle for hip hop icon Snoop Dogg and the younger, but very popular, Wiz Khalifa doesn’t approach the classic of the genre. We won’t even mention Cheech & Chong – oops, I guess I did already. It doesn’t approach the level of wit and cleverness of, say, Jay & Silent Bob or Pineapple Express, even the nerdy subversive stoner-ness of Napoleon Dynamite. Mac & Devin, instead, hits the viewer over the head with its pot smoking shenanigans right from the opening salvo with a talking joint imploring you to blaze up so that, you know, the movie will be funnier. Caution: if you need to be stoned out of your mind to find any humor at all in a stoner flick, it’s definitely bad. The awfulness doesn’t end there – the cliches just pile up as the film goes on. Snoop Dogg and Wiz Khalifa play the usual odd couple stoner flick matchup, with Snoop as Mac, a 15^th year high school senior and pot dealer and Khalifa as Mac an uptight AP student struggling to write his valedictorian speech. The two become fast friends when Mac slips Devin a funny brownie and the straight laced Devin becomes hooked on the newfound feeling of freedom and just kicking back with no worries. Soon, however, Mac finds himself smitten with the beautiful young substitute teacher who wants nothing to do with him unless he graduates. So Devin must help him cram all his years of high school into a few weeks so he can pass. On the other end, Mac is learning how to break free from his controlling girlfriend and loosen up. Smoky, psychedelic segments, gross out scenes and hip hop sequences abound. Too bad nothing here is all that funny, especially the bits that are supposed to be, like the talking cannabis plant explaining the different varieties of weed. Maybe of they didn’t try so hard.

Video Quality

The video quality is middling at best, offering only an average amount of detail and a medium level of contrast. Textures are a bit smooth and video noise is definitely evident.

Audio Quality

For a hip hop stoner flick, I expected the Dolby TrueHD 5.1 (48kHz/24-bit) soundtrack to be much weightier than what is supplied with Mac & Devin. Although the dialogue is clean and the rest of the mix is rather straightforward with little going on in the surround tracks, the musical segments seem a bit timid, with low frequencies that are weaker than expected. It’s still enjoyable, but it doesn’t have that “oomph” I was looking for.

Supplemental Materials