Pineapple Express

Pineapple Express (2008)

Directed by: David Gordon Green

Starring: Seth Rogen, James Franco, Danny McBride

Other Actors of Note: Gary Cole, Rosie Perez

Plot: Lazy stoner Dale Denton has only one reason to visit his equally lazy dealer Saul Silver: to purchase weed, specifically, a rare new strain called Pineapple Express. But when Dale becomes the only witness to a murder by a crooked cop and the city's most dangerous drug lord, he panics and dumps his roach of Pineapple Express at the scene. Dale now has another reason to visit Saul: to find out if the weed is so rare that it can be traced back to him. And it is. As Dale and Saul run for their lives, they quickly discover that they're not suffering from weed-fueled paranoia; incredibly, the bad guys really are hot on their trail and trying to figure out the fastest way to kill them both. All aboard the Pineapple Express. Taken from www.imdb.com.

The look on James Franco's face will haunt my nightmares for eternity.

This is a hard review to do... mostly because I saw it and I'm still not really sure if this is a bad movie or a good movie.

"Pineapple Express" is a Judd Apatow movie version of "Pulp Fiction" in the style of "Cheech and Chong." If that makes any sense to you then could you explain it to me please? Because I'm still not sure I get it.

No less, it's about Dale Denton (Seth Rogen) a stoner who serves subpoenas to people. He's dating an 18-year-old high school student (Amber Heard) and dodging a meeting with her parents. In his free time he visits his dealer Saul (James Franco) who has the monopoly on a special and extremely potent brand of marijuana known as "Pineapple Express" (Hey! That's the title of this movie!)

So anyway Danny gets in trouble when he goes to serve a subpoena to Saul's supplier's supplier Ted Jones (Gary Cole) and sees Ted and a female cop (Rosie Perez) killing a rival dealer. As he makes his escape he alerts both of them to his existence by hitting two parked cars several times and dropping a joint on the ground of guess what? The rarest strain of weed in the city that's only sold by one person.

So Danny goes back to Saul's and they talk about how the only way that Ted could know that Saul has the Pineapple Express is through the middleman supplier Red (Danny McBride) what they don't know is that Red has already been contacted by two inept hitmen, Budlofsky (Kevin Corrigan) and Matheson (Craig Robinson), who are in the process of hunting the two men down.

"Shh... I think I see the plot. Don't talk or you might scare it away. "

Seth Rogen plays the type of character Seth Rogen always plays. He's the lovable dumpy loser who does basically nothing and has some growing up to do. If you've seen "The 40 Year Old Virgin", "Knocked Up", or even "Superbad" to a degree then you've seen it before.

Now I have a Master's degree in hating James Franco. I'm the president of his anti-fan club (call me for an "I hate James Franco" t-shirt) but Franco is the shining star of this picture. Playing a stoner isn't particularly hard and just about everybody has done it, but James Franco does it really well. You can almost see individual thoughts slowly enter his head and appear on his face. Many of the conversations between Franco and Rogen are the most hilarious portions of the film.

Kevin Corrigan and Craig Robinson are simultaneously the most entertaining and bizarre characters in the film seeming to be a parody of Jules Winnfield (Samuel L. Jackson) and Vincent Vega (John Travolta) from "Pulp Fiction." Their dialogue is nonsensical, off-the-wall, and most of the time just strange.

Gary Cole (AKA Harvey Birdman) and Rosie Perez (AKA "that really annoying woman from "White Men Can't Jump") have a fairly good on-screen chemistry as a drug lord and a corrupt cop. They have a sort of antagonistic relationship which makes for one of the more interesting small plot points of the movie.

Then of course there's Danny McBride as Red. Danny is probably the most unkillable character in the history of cinema, he gets shot at least 7 times, breaks a sink off the wall with his neck, gets his head plowed into drywall, and is in a building when it explodes and still seems to get back up and be able to walk and talk with little trouble. Danny is also one of the most bizarre and quirky characters of the film who bakes a cake for his now 3-years-dead cat on its birthday and talks about how the lack of armpit hair makes him more aerodynamic when he fights.

"Hey remember that Judd Apatow movie where they they said fuck a lot? That was great..."

For a comedy, "Pineapple Express" is surprisingly bloody and even gory at times. It is in special effects very much in the spirit of a Quentin Tarantino movie with just about everybody except James Franco having taken a bullet before the end and everybody getting at least a little bloodied up.

This is also not to mention well made fight scenes, a car chase, and a myriad of gunfights and explosions that really don't really seem to belong but are awesome none-the-less.

Assume tired "end of action movie" pose.

Now stoner films while a vastly over-used genre have had some truly greatsubmissions like "Up in Smoke", "Rolling Kansas", "Dazed and Confused", and "Half Baked" ("The Big Lebowski" doesn't count because having a movie where the main character smokes a joint every now and then doesn't make it a stoner movie, fuckheads... also your mother's a whore.)

But "Pineapple Express" tries to be what to the best of my knowledge is the first stoner action movie. The results are a bit skewed.

The opening starts like any other Judd Apatow productions film. The loveable loser, lots of profanity and inane and offensive yet funny dialogue, and then the movie seems to take a strange turn into some sort of action comedy ala "Lethal Weapon" and it's just as jarring as the second act of this summer's "Hancock."

The humor is funny and the action is good they just don't seem to belong together. The movie seems to end only because it doesn't know what else to do.

In many ways, "Pineapple Express" is like the little known Bill Murray comedy "The Man Who Knew Too Little" or the immature Tom Arnold vehicle "The Stupids" where a less than intelligent person winds up in a deadly situation and through nothing more than his own bumbling accidentally ends up being mistaken for some sort of professional assassin by the film's "bad guy."

Pretty much all of the action that Danny and Saul end up partaking in is entirely coincidental. The end makes sure to toss in a subplot with the villain's Asian competition throwing in a death squad just so there's some gunfighting going on around the climax. And a prologue to the plot taking place in 1937 has no bearing on the story except to tell us that there's a bunker in the middle of nowhere that the government once grew weed in even though the only time this scene is even vaguely referred to is when we see the same bunker under the ownership of Gary Cole later in the film with no reference to it once being government owned and run. Making the plot-point absolutely moot and unnecessary.

One of the plot lines with with Seth Rogen and his teenage girlfriend is broken off abruptly and one wonders why it wasn't expanded on more. The only semblance of plot seems to be with Seth Rogen finally realizing he's best friends with his pot dealer which is pretty weak. There's echoes of a possible plot point of realizing that maybe smoking weed all the time makes you a bit useless but that seems to have been shitcanned in favor of not offending the sort of fucktards clogging up the imdb.com message boards with "Marijuana isn't bad for you" and "Those who hate pot just haven't tried it" topics. (Yes yes, I know, it's not addictive, you quit six times last year. I'm impressed... really. Hey maybe you should crack a dictionary and look up the definition of the word "quit" sometime.)

Of course the odd thing is that even recognizing these glaring flaws I didn't dislike the movie. Sure there were several moments where I just sat and watched in confused awe, but the thing was, I had fun. I found myself laughing along to the profane and usually juvenile humor. Even the violent scenes are rather funny (the fight scene between Danny, Red, and Saul is pure gold) and enjoyable.

This happens often.

The violence is 100% gratuitous, the movie has only the vaguest hints of plot, the characters aren't particularly well-written, and the movie seems to have no real point or purpose and the only message it seems to be delivering is "Be best friends with your drug dealer." But it still manages to make you laugh in spite of yourself and have a fun time.

I begrudgingly give "Pineapple Express" a 4 out of 5. You'll enjoy it, you just won't know why.