Synopsis

A pothead and his pot dealer get caught up in a murder, along with the dealer's dealer. But this is a comedy, so nobody is particularly good at what they're doing. Not the perpetually stoned pothead and his dealer, not the maladroit trafficker who wants them all dead, not the two bumbling hitmen who are working out their own jealousy issues, and not the competing Asian drug cartel which starts a drug-war just as all of this goes down. Understand? I didn't, either.

Pros:

• Seth Rogan is still likable and funny as his usual stoned, dirty Winnie-The-Pooh character.


• James Franko and Danny McBride are fairly funny, too, as half-assed pot pushers.

Cons:

• A lot of violence that doesn't fit with the rest of the movie.


• More "roll your eyes" moments than I can remember.


• A few long, dry passages without any laughs.


• Some cameos were distractions. I should not miss key dialogue because I'm thinking "Is that Ed Begley, Jr? I think that's Ed Begley, Jr. Hey, I think that's the first time I ever heard him drop the f-bomb." Etc.


• They even brought in Kevin Corrigan, a legit dramatic actor who's played criminal types in American Gangster and The Departed and even True Romance. I scratched my head for an hour trying to figure out where I'd seen him before. When I finally figured it out I felt tricked. I'd have recognized him a mile away in a crime drama. But in an Apatow movie? Geesh.

Generally:

1.5 on a five scale. And it wouldn't score that high if I just didn't flat out like Seth Rogan.

Extended Review:

Pineapple Express is the latest, and the least, in the string of commercially successful comedies from Judd Apatow's cinematic cabal. Like the superior comedies that preceded it, this movie has been brought to the screen by a pack of producer/writer/actor types, including Apatow, Seth Rogan, Danny McBride, Evan Goldberg ... and this time directed by David Gordon Green (of all people), the indie darling behind All The Real Girls and Undertow.

There are a number of possible reasons to explain why Pineapple Express falls short. Maybe it was that the director's "artistic" sensibilities conflicted with the slapstick anything-for-a-laugh approach that Apatow's productions employ.

Maybe it was that Apatow and crew were a little giddy about their first chance to make a movie with guns, squibs, explosions and fake blood. They sure throw the violence around everywhere in this film without ever really establishing a "motif" for the violent content. Movies like Kill Bill take the violence to a ridiculous extreme to establish that the story takes place in it's own world, not the real world. Other films, such as Blackhawk Down, use violence to establish a gritty realism. Then there are movies like Shoot 'Em Up, where stylized, bloody violence is played entirely for laughs, like a mock Looney Tunes cartoon.

Pineapple Express seems to want the violence to do all of that, and then some. So there's no real context for it. One character is shot something like seven times over the course of the film and brushes it off. His bullet wounds become a running gag ("Am I really stoned or have I just lost that much blood?") Other characters are shot in the head with bloody, violent, sudden realism. There's a huge fight between three men who trash a house (ala The Three Stooges) and try in vain to hurt each other. That bit is funny, but the bigger fight toward the end, involving the destruction of a barn, is just a bloody mess.

I don't mind violence in a movie if it makes sense. If it establishes and adheres to it's own context. If it doesn't, violent content can become a distraction. Too much of it can ruin a movie. Maybe it was all the gunfire and blood that ultimately drove the Pineapple Express off the rails.

Other elements of the film were, I admit, pretty good. If you enjoy Seth Rogan's modern slacker stoned-Albert-Brooks routine, you'll probably enjoy his performance here. I happen to like the guy and I did enjoy watching him schlub his way through this series of misadventures. His characer had, as he always does in these films, his big "come to Jesus" moment when he realized that he needed to change his life. But it seemed tacked on here rather than part of the larger theme.

And that's another complaint with Pineapple Express: The absolute absence of a larger theme. Knocked Up, Superbad, Forgetting Sarah Marshall and The 40 Year Old Virgin, are all vulgar comedies built on timeless coming-of-age templates. The characters have actual arcs, the stories have clear beginnings, middles and ends, and when the film is over we feel like we've had a ... well, an experience ... by watching the movie.

Not so with Pineapple Express. This time we've just watch Rogen bumble his way through a great deal of violence. There are laughs along the way. A gag involving a car chase with the driver's foot through the window was a hoot. James Franco and Danny McBride both get a couple of big laughs with their understated delivery of a couple of classic one-liners. Best of all, Pineapple Express contains the funniest non sequitur Jude Law reference that I've ever heard. That one joke is almost enough to justify the mess you have to wade through to get to it.

But not quite.

I can't recommend Pineapple Express to fans of the Rogan-Goldberg-Apataw comedy formula. That formula itself is probably still a great receipe for guffaws and wet-snort laughter and, gosh darn it, a good lesson learned along the way.

This time, though, they messed with the formula, added violence and lots of blood and references to talk radio and villians played by the oddly out of place Gary Cole and Rosie Perez. This ain't a good mix.

I don't know, maybe throwing Jonah Hill in there somewhere would have brought balance to the force. I doubt it, though. They'd have probably cast him as another gun-crazy thug.

Hopefully they'll get back to the good stuff with the next film, the Apatow directed Funny People. I can't wait to find out. After all, it's gonna take more than one rotten pineapple to totally stop the Apatow/Rogan comedy express.

Trailer (Explicit language)

Labels: Movie Reviews, Movies