A trustworthy storyteller recognizes that the essence of fantasy relies less on a filmmaker’s potential to suspend disbelief and more on their ability to create a plausible universe within which to frame their work. Herschel Greenbaum (Seth Rogen) is a Russian-Jewish immigrant, transplanted to Brooklyn in 1919, where he worked as a pickler. Revived from a briny 100 year snooze, and without so much as one tweet or TV crew to acknowledge him, Herschel exits the hospital freer than if he’d been there visiting a sick friend. Huh? There’s not one wrinkled nose when a dead-ringer for Tevya in a touring company of Fiddler on the Roof, back from the dead and sporting the same clothes he was pickled in, walks past. Big lapses in logic to overcome, but then, it’s early in the picture. Next up, the presence of street-corner seltzer vendors in ancient Brooklyn. I’ll go along with them, and even buy into Herschel’s desire to just once in his life have a sip of the then-cost-prohibitive carbonated refreshment. The centenarian goes to live with his great-great-grandson, and the presence of a seltzer water maker in Ben’s (Rogen in a dual role) kitchen doesn't trouble me one bit. What sets me spinning is that after a full reel spent milking this cow-sized gag, Ben hands Herschel a glass of freshly-charged water without so much as one bubble surging through it. We open strong (a gag in the old country involving defective shovels) and close big (a mid-credits nod to Rogen co-star Barbra Streisand’s Yentl) — but it’s the enclosed bickering and one-upmanship, compounded by obvious political parallels, that leaves the audience in a pickle. (2020) — Scott Marks