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Review: Pineapple Express

It had to happen sometime. As much as I had hoped to stave it off for as long as possible, the day had to come when I would leave a Judd Apatow production utterly dissatisfied. “Forgetting Sarah Marshall” nearly did me in, but further rumination on the film showed a real maturation happening in the cabal of dirty little boys that surround the Hollywood comedy magnate. Too bad that the progression toward a better kind of toilet humor didn’t make it’s way into the teams latest, and arguably most anticipated, “Pineapple Express”.

About a year after unexpected leading man Seth Rogen and friend/co-writer Evan Goldberg struck box office gold with the high school raunch-fest “Superbad”, they’re back at it again, but this time setting their sights a little higher than getting some poon before graduation. This time they have set out to make a stoner-action-comedy with a legit call to arms for legalization of marijuana hidden beneath the surface. Rather, put that message on the surface and bury the rest of the film underneath and you will start to see what this film looks like.

Don’t get me wrong, I laughed plenty during this film, and both Mr. Rogen, as Dale Denton, and fellow freak (of “Freaks and Geeks”, duh) James Franco, as Dale’s drug dealer Saul Silver, more than delivered on their roles as both punchlines and protagonists. They are funny and they are high off their asses throughout the film, yet even your mom will still find a way to let them into your hearts. Maybe it is Dale’s natural appeal as a regular guy, or Saul’s repeated love of his Bubby, but even when they seem like the lowest of lowlifes you are able to empathize with their most basic of needs, not the least of which is staying alive through the end of the film. Still, if this movie were a bowl I would have liked to be a bit more tightly packed.

The story is this: Dale is a civil servant who is on his way to serve a subpoena to the biggest drug dealer on the west coast (I know) when POP!, said baddie, Ted Jones, kills a family member of the Asian competition. Having witnessed this, the bloodshot Dale tosses heads screeching out of there but not before Jones sees him, setting things in motion for a violent comedy of mistaken identity. They decide that Denton must be working for the Asian competition so he becomes wanted man #1 for the white dealers and their lackey cop, played by Rosie Perez. Sadly, this is no “Johnny Stecchino” or even “Dumb and Dumber”; the mistaken identity plot is never fully realized, which is a shame because it would have been a nice hook upon which to hang the story.

When Mr. Rogen and Mr. Franco find the time throughout the film to just riff alongside one another prove to be the real high points as has become clear of the former’s writing style. His characters are at their best when they are just sitting around smoking pot and shooting the shit. As dumb as it sounds, he may be somewhere close to Quentin Tarantino in his ability to hold our focus while our characters do nothing whatsoever. In between those hilarious fits of dialogue, however, this is supposed to be something of an action film, and it never rises to that level. Does the blame here lay squarely on the scribe’s shoulders? Probably not.

The reason why I referred to “Pineapple Express” a few paragraphs ago is that this is the first time we have really seen a director with some significant street cred take on an Apatow project (I’m sorry, Greg Mottola, but a decade passed between “The Daytrippers” and “Superbad”). David Gordon Green decided to make his move from the fringe to the mainstream with this film, and I’m not totally sure why. I got very pissed off last summer when critics ignored the efforts of Mr. Mottola on “Superbad”, though now we can see how much life he breathed into that screenplay, mostly because we now see that Mr. Green didn’t bring any kind of originality to this film. I know that the studio system tends to tie the hands of ambitious directors, but if that is the case here then Sony/Columbia must have bound and gagged Mr. Green throughout the duration of production. Had he been directing a made-for-TV-movie, he would have done a stellar job. Our perspective is incredibly close and irresponsibly mundane. The film looked like a shot sheet written on top of a screenplay by a penny-pinching producer. This is why the action is consistently flat. When I saw the trailer, one of the reasons I wanted to see this film was the shot where Mr. Rogen flies, ninja-style, from a catwalk onto a bad dude’s head. There was so much promise for this move to be as cinematicaly gratifying as when Adam Sandler spins his crowbar in “Punch Drunk Love” or when the Batman turns around on his pod in this summer’s “The Dark Knight”, but it kinda just happens for no reason.

In the end, we are left with a few laughs and a fairly high body-count. It feels like the guys in Apatow’s hand just didn’t have much to do one weekend so they decided to make this film, which is a shame because I feel that everyone involved in this film is so much more talented than they let on this time out. Still, there is that usual wit and charm that have become a part of these boys’ films. They are certainly pushing the envelope with what kind of characters we will grow to like over the course of 2 hours, but let’s hope they push it more successfully next time.