PINEAPPLE EXPRESS (2008) - Action/Comedy/Crime/Thriller, R, 111 mins.
Put this in your pipe and smoke it!
I have to tell you an absolutely true story of something that happened today. I went to the theater to see Pineapple Express, and it was one of those rare experiences where the theater was packed even at 2pm on a Wednesday afternoon, and there were a lot of times during the movie that everyone in the theater was laughing so hard that you couldn’t hear the movie anymore.
But the unusual part is that, just after one of those bouts of hysterical laughter, someone started kicking the back of a chair a couple seats away from me, and it turned out to be a little kid that was laughing so hard that he almost choked on an ice cube. It was actually a little scary.
The movie starts out with a black and white scene that takes place back in the late 1940s, I believe, where the government is conducting experiments in an underground bunker on the effects of marijuana on the human mind. A lucky volunteer is locked in a room where he smokes weed constantly, periodically helped along by a guy in a foil suit, in case he needs a light. During simple psychological questioning, he doesn’t give the answers that the scientists and the government guys in suits want to hear, so they promptly illegalize it.
Personally it doesn’t make a lot of difference to me if weed is legal or not, but the movie makes a pretty strong statement. And it’s worth mentioning, by the way, the effect of making it an illegal drug. We Americans don’t have the greatest track record for successfully outlawing certain things that people are just going to get anyway. For example, we all know what gave rise to the mafia in America, right? Prohibition!!
Seth Rogen plays Dale Denton, a regular guy with a regular job who just wants to get a regular high. He works as a process server, and if you don’t know what that is, you’re in good shape, because process servers are those people that approach you out of nowhere and say your first and last name to you with a question mark at the end, and when you say yes, they hand you a piece of paper full of bad news and walk away saying “You’ve been served.” Needless to say, it’s a pretty thankless job, so he needs to spend most of his time stoned.
James Franco is incredibly effective in his role in this movie, which is almost a little disturbing. He plays Saul, Dale’s drug dealer, and he maintains an astonishing quantity and variety of quality weed. This is, by the way, the only interest that Dale has in him, until he unwittingly witnesses a gangland murder involving a corrupt cop (Rosie Perez) and her drug lord.
Soon Dale and Saul become involved in a full scale gang war and are running for their very lives, and get this, it’s all because the weed that Saul sold to Dale is so good. They become reluctant best friends, allowing for some of the funniest moments in the movie, such as a scene where they get into a fight with one of Saul’s friends, Red (Danny McBride, who nearly steals the show), in which they kick the crap out of each other and destroy Red’s apartment, alternately threatening and apologizing to each other because none of them is entirely sure why they’re fighting. This has to be one of the funniest movie brawls ever.
There’s a goofy romantic subplot involving Dale and his high school girlfriend that feels a little undeveloped. Like a lot of the rest of the movie, it was probably part of an effort to present as many bizarre and unbelievable situations imaginable, and the result is a genuinely odd contraption of a film that is amazing in how well-written and well-made it is, given the fact that there’s really no way that Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg could have come up with this stuff unless they were stoned out of their minds.
The movie is incredibly violent and packed full of vicious profanity and so will make a terrible date movie for a lot of unsuspecting high school kids, but the rest of us will be glad that they didn’t cop out and shoot for the largest possible audience. It’s not often that a movie so saturated with weed can come along and be so much fun for an audience that smokes weed or doesn’t, but Pineapple Express moves at such a brisk pace and is full of good laughs and strangely amusing situations. Just don’t see it with your parents…
Starring Seth Rogen, James Franco, and Danny McBride
Written by Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg
Directed by David Gordon Green
You’re breaking my heart, ladies!
