One quiet country evening, I convinced my trusty amigo Travis to join me in the long country drive to the nearest picture show to see Pineapple Express. “So what’s this movie about?”,Travis asked. Eager to appear hip to someone fresh from a summer at UT Austin, an Indie-culture-saturated university, I pretended to have heard Pineapple Express regaled as the great Indie comedy of the year: perhaps akin to The Royal Tenenbaums or The Dar-jeeling Limited (does that count as “Indie?”). The reality was that I had heard the tail end of a review on NPR – the reviewer said something about “stoners.” Perhaps Harold & Kumar-esque? I assured Travis that Knocked-Up star Seth Rogen (acting, producing, and writing for Pineapple Express) would reveal the acting genius everyone just knows is lurking after Knocked Up and Superbad.
I’m afraid Pineapple Express exceeded all expectations for a “stoner” movie. Never had I dared to dream that one could make a movie entirely about marijuana,in which the characters do nothing but smoke marijuana and emulate scientist Mendel and his peas,creating marijuana “babies.”Pineapple Express embodies all and more of these miraculous marijuana scenarios, but unfortunately because of this, it is only enjoyable to those moviegoers stoned out of their minds.
The main characters, Dale Denton (Seth Rogen), a twenty-something deadbeat with a high school girlfriend,and his pathetic pajama-wearing drug dealer Saul Silver (James Franco), become caught up in a battle between two drug lords. Dale witnesses the murder of a “team-Asian” drug dealer by the city’s white trash drug lord and a crooked cop, and leaves behind his rare and easily traceable Pineapple Express-species roach, making him a dead duck once “team-White Trash” can track him down. Frankly, the plot is simple, and provides an accessible structure for a comedy counting on laughs from gratuitous violence, unsavory characters, and Superbad-type humor.
Any fan of Superbad,or anyone who enjoys laughing their ass off at disgusting toilet-humor and sex jokes told by characters pa- thetic enough to make everyone feel good about themselves, will be thrilled with Pineapple Express but disappointed that there aren’t more sex jokes.The plot is loosely connected by several very long joint smoking scenes,two epic-length fight scenes,and a third character: an overweight drug dealer, Red (Danny R. McBride), who is shot seven times but refuses to die. Every scene in Pineapple Express could exist as its own short-length feature, emulating spoof scenes from Date Movie or any of the Scary Movie movies, and giving the viewer a detailed look at the miracles of marijuana.
Perhaps I should have known that Pineapple Express was not my kind of movie: I knew going into it that I could only take about half an hour of masturbation and anal bead jokes. But in my defense, all theaters showing this film really should advise viewers to budget a roach into their movie-viewing budget or risk absolutely wasting 111 minutes. So, after 20 minutes I found myself wondering whether we shouldn’t just sneak into The Mummy 3.Every 5 minutes I reconsidered my options until I became preoccupied trying to imagine who the hell funded Pineapple Express. Who was stoned enough to read this sorry excuse for a script and say,“Wow! What witty prose!”? I turned this over in my mind until the credits finally rolled. No surprise – indeed the executive producers are the authors of the screenplay, are the creators of the story, and are the actors. Only the mother could love this child.
While occasional exposition on the afterlife, and how to obtain spiritual satisfaction (“If you do something heroic then you’ll come back as like an eagle or a dragon, or Jude Law,”says Rogen) always help to expand the minds of Americans, I feel the rest of the movie turns those brains to mush. Seth Rogen’s second foray into producing his own scripts lacks humor,plot,and significance. Save your money and buy some weed.
