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This Film On

• Internet Movie Database (IMDB)

Pineapple Express

(2008)

112 min. Sony Pictures Releasing. Director: David Gordon Green. Cast: James Franco, Seth Rogen, Craig Robinson, James Remar, Joe Lo Truglio.

Early in the stoner action comedy Pineapple Express, co-writer/star Seth Rogen delivers a litany of reasons why pot is beneficial, culminating in "It makes shitty movies better." While certainly true, the line also reads as a winking self-reference to the film's own limited ambition. Of course Rogen, uber-producer Judd Apatow, and director David Gordon Green want Pineapple Express to be good, but they'll settle for it being "good when you're high."

The plot situates nerve-wracked, pot-smoking process server Dale Denton (Rogen) and his dim-bulb pot dealer Saul Silver (James Franco) in the middle of a drug war. Before the thriller plot kicks in, Rogen and co-screenwriter Evan Goldberg (Superbad) take their time establishing Denton, his awkward relationship of three months with a high-school girl (Amber Heard), and his tentative friendship with Saul, a lonely stoner in the mood to bond with nice client Dale since all of Saul's other customers are apparently idiots and jerks. The laid-back scene introducing Saul is easily one of the film's best. Rogen is winningly casual and certainly funny (not to mention credible as a lifelong toker), but Franco turns in a magnificently free and spontaneous performance that's both wholly believable and hilarious.

The trouble begins when Saul offers Dale the cream of the crop: a rare new pot blend called Pineapple Express ("It's like God's vagina," Saul enthuses). Dale shortly becomes witness to a murder, leaving behind a telltale roach. The not-so-dynamic duo goes on the run, troubleshooting on the way Dale's girlfriend and her parents (Ed Begley Jr. and Nora Dunn). Comic actor of the moment Danny McBride (Drillbit Taylor, The Foot Fist Way) plays Red, an untrustworthy acquaintance who sparks a purposefully clumsy fight sequence amongst the three men and, like the killer in a horror movie, refuses to go quietly from the film. Craig Robinson (The Office) also brings the funny as an ever-frustrated thug.

These scenes and a subsequent car chase keep the film running for the better part of its first two acts, setting aside a meandering detour to the woods. Rogen and Goldberg reliably deliver amusing non sequiturs (Saul's suggestion that he and Dale could be tracked by "heat-seeking missiles, bloodhounds, foxes, barracudas"), pop culture references (from "Electric Avenue" to 227), and character comedy (like Saul's reaction to learning Dale is a process server: "You're a servant, like a butler?"). Plus, indie stalwart Green and longtime cinematographer Tim Orr inject their dusty visual style, in counterpoint to a prologue that simultaneously parodies, complete with black-and-white and theremin, '50s sci-fi horror and Reefer Madness.

The film runs into a spot of trouble when it has to "grow up" and resolve its plot. Scenes with Gary Cole as the baddie and Rosie Perez as his corrupt-cop lover fail to overcome the reality that they're obligatory plotting (though Perez's character allows for Dale's amusingly wrongheaded appraisal "What an adorable little cop"). And the film has tonal difficulty reconciling the run-of-the-mill exaggeration of action comedy with surreal parody, as when the Asian druglords show up in their ninja blacks (sigh), and we find ourselves watching Ken Jeong (the real-life doctor who played the gyno in Knocked Up) tossing a knife into a guy's neck. Finally, the emotional arc doesn't exactly have a pot of gold at the end of it--an amusingly conceived wrap-up in a diner can't disguise the increasingly familiar taste of Apatow bromance.

To be sure, there's some humor to be mined by aping an '80s-style action movie while subverting '80s action cliches. In one small, well-observed moment, we see how unreasonably easy it is for action stars to pull off manuevers like climbing into a vent and reaching down to hoist someone else off the ground (most of the other skewered cliches are more obvious, like a slo-mo leap and the easy flow of guns and bullets throughout a shootout sequence). The scoring by Graeme Revell is pretty hilarious, and be sure to stay through the credits for the retro Huey Lewis title tune.

Despite its rusty mechanics and hodgepodge of tones, Pineapple Express convincingly imitates the mode of Midnight Run: on-the-run odd-couple comedy with gunplay and car chases. Green has made his first eager-to-please film, and his first that's completely devoid of deeper meaning. These are disconcerting qualities for Green enthusiasts (and multiplex-goers hopefully learning to expect more from the movies). But "green" enthusiasts and Apatow acolytes will happily groove to this movie, and they have enough good reason.