Pineapple Express

The good news: I can actually find things funny. I laughed several times and genuinely so during this movie.

The bad news: third act what the fu...

Meet alliteratively named Dale Denton (Seth Rogan), a process server, who spends his days serving subpoenas, calling talk radio shows and smoking a seemingly excessive amount of pot (seemingly because really I don't have any clue what an excessive amount is - one? five? its not really my thing). Dale gets his pot from equally alliteratively named Saul Silver (James Franco). Saul a lovable loser likes Dale and offers him up some new extremely good marijuana called Pineapple Express. Fast friendship has been made. Dale continues with his job duties and winds up at the house of a drug lord at the inopportune time when he happens to be killing a rival.

Dale runs and brings Saul along, the dealer discovers who Dale and Saul are and chases them. Dale and Saul bond over pot and their fear as they run. Granted they don't run very effectively since they are constantly making stops to smoke up, feast on munchies and be distracted by anything. The movie really gets into its grove about midway through the film. Yes its buddy/stoner comedy but it eschews the typical format of an epic quest for burgers or whatever and goes more surreal. It is certainly kindred with The Big Lebowski though not near as good and while in that film the the smoking was a character trait, here it is front and center and the driving force.

Above it all is that the two characters are likable. Rogen is as always the chubby, lovable loser espousing dreams he will not likely ever accomplish but he thinks he will. Franco is splendid as the absentminded Saul. Just listen to him mention his "second favorite civil engineer" (That line might be genuinely funnier than anything else he says). The two together have great chemistry and you drive whole hearted into the surreal plot because they are leading you with their charm. Danny McBride is the other bright spot of the film. He plays Saul's supplier Red. He's just about the funniest thing in the whole movie. Whether he's beating up someone with household appliances or ruing the fact that he's been shot repeatedly.

Not that all the casting is great. Gary Cole plays the drug lord and well he doesn't ever really rise above my recollection of him as Mr. Brady in the feature films of the 1990s. He doesn't even act like that much of an effective drug lord. Rosie Perez plays a dirty cop on his payroll and she acts pretty much batshit insane (again without any coherent reason). The film was directed by David Gordon Green the man behind the very interesting George Washington and the nice All the Real Girls and the unseen by me Snow Angels. Manhola Dargis of the New York Times recently wrote of him "a regional filmmaker who’s been making a beeline for the mainstream." I don't read this as a compliment.

Green is decent with the comedic stoner motif narrative and you can see his artistic flare (heavily influenced by Terrence Malick) at small moments (the doped up twits leap frogging through a forest for example). There are some profoundly nice shots that sort of leap out because they don't really mix with the frentic stoner driven plot. The plot unfortunately ends up calling for numerous action sequences which frankly seem to baffle Mr. Green. They aren't exciting or tense and I was at times turning to my watch in impatience.

This is of course really tragic given the third act. Abandoning its tone and humor for largely a conventional action set piece. The heroes new found prowess with guns is far too much. The action continues to boor and the narrative devolves into a more and more ridiculous uninteresting mess. Asian ninjas, guns, bombs and elaborate fight sequences carry us to the end with occasional jokes thrown in that do very little. It took me some time to get into the film but once I did I was fully enjoying it until the disaster of the final act. Still overall its better than most comedies out there and undoubtedly is another win in the Judd Apatow column.