Apatow and company fire up a skunk.
Pineapple Express is the big summer movie many have been waiting for: the one where Judd Apatow’s camp finally and irredeemably misses the mark. Co-written by Evan Goldberg and star Seth Rogen (from a story by Apatow and Rogen & Goldberg), the film lacks the sense of innocence that made the raunchy zaniness of the duo’s previous offering Superbad so charming. Instead, viewers are treated to a rambling and repetitive mess of a picture that consistently fails to entertain.
This time around Rogen plays Dale Denton, a habitually stoned process server who obtains a unique strain of marijuana (the Pineapple Express of the title) from his brain-fried dealer Saul (James Franco). In the most contrived plot device you’ll see this year, Rogen must serve papers on the local drug kingpin Ted (Gary Cole), only to witness him and a policewoman (Rosie Perez) murder a member of a rival gang. Later identified by the super-rare joint that he dropped at the scene, Dale must go into hiding with Saul in tow, and along the way a codependent bromance blossoms between this odd couple.
Hilarity should ensue, but it doesn’t. After an insufferable hour of uninspired stoner humor (read: lots of confused screaming), Pineapple Express actually manages to descend into a thoroughly mindless buddy action film with a body count to rival Kill Bill. It’s a schizophrenic jumble of two wholly dissimilar films that director David Gordon Green never remotely glues into a coherent whole. The film’s selling point of course is its sophomoric humor; the problem is, this time it’s not funny. The Apatow camp seems to pride itself on pushing the envelope, but in Pineapple Express the positively telegraphed jokes are so predictable, so obvious and so formulaic as to destroy any pretense of risk by the filmmakers. (You can probably already guess the one-liner that Dale delivers upon finally defeating the bad guys.) And the light-hearted depiction of violence in the final act is simply cynical and irresponsible. On the plus side, the low-brow shenanigans contain remarkably little toilet humor.
Maybe less surprisingly, the sentiment beneath the jokes feels too familiar. Apatow’s films have distinguished themselves from other bawdy comedies through the endearing sensitivity of their self-destructive characters. If one simply wants outrageous gross-out humor, the Farrelly brothers provide such laughs better than anyone, and even the preposterously banal Harold and Kumar movies at least managed to be unpredictable. But Pineapple Express develops the relationships as faithfully by the numbers as it delivers the vacant punch lines. We know that Dale and Saul will split up, only to inevitably realize that they’re best pals and save each other in the end, because we’ve seen the exact same thing before – so why follow the same strict formula again? Superbad seemed to stand out because of the characters’ naïveté, yet after watching the same notes played again and again in Pineapple Express, perhaps it was the audience that was naïve.
It’s no surprise then that Rogen’s Dale is alternately cuddly and flustered, and that particular brand of schtick is beginning to wear thin (especially given his involvement in crafting such incoherent chaos). Franco deserves some credit for playing completely against type, but he never registers anything beyond muddled neediness. For that matter, the background is littered with talented character actors (including Kevin Corrigan, The Office’s Craig Robinson, and of course Cole, who’s nicely succeeded the late J.T. Walsh in playing mean white guys) who all seem miscast or at least misdirected, filling roles that do not play to their strengths. Ed Begley, Jr. alone manages to shine as the father of Dale’s teenaged girlfriend, but his character is tiny in comparison to the drug supplier played charmlessly by Danny R. McBride.
Not having seen the film “under the influence,” I’m sure I missed something that the filmmakers believed they were accomplishing during the film’s development. One shouldn’t have to distort one’s own perceptions to be able to enjoy a film though, and yet Pineapple Express is still as disappointing as any chemically-induced crash.
- Stephen Kabel
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