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.