STUDIO: Warner Brothers
RELEASE DATE: August 6, 2008
STARRING: Seth Rogen, James Franco, Danny McBride, Gary Cole, Kevin Corrigan, Rosie Perez, and Amber Heard
WRITTEN BY: Seth Rogen & Evan Goldberg
DIRECTED BY: David Gordon Green
GENRE: Comedy
RATING: R

Honestly, I was never much of a fan of weed comedies. By the time I was old enough to see them, the Cheech & Chong movies had already become relics of a bygone era and I've suffered through a few too many awful Method Man comedies in the days since. The Harold and Kumar movies have their charms, but those often have nothing to do with actual pot (I find the racial and social elements of those movies much more interesting), and the rest of the great stoner movies can be counted on one hand. Does Dazed and Confused count? The Big Lebowski? Well, we can add another gloriously upraised finger to that appendage because the cannabis comedy du jour, Pineapple Express, is an absolute blast, as great a comedy high as you'll have this summer and the perfect second batter in the R-rated comedy trifecta of late summer 2008 that started with Step Brothers and ends next week with Tropic Thunder. It's not as perfect a laugh-fest as some of the late summer gems of recent years like Superbad, The 40-Year-Old Virgin, or The Wedding Crashers, but it's a more consistently clever comedy thrill ride than any other in this awful year for the genre. Maybe there's hope for the adult comedy yet - in a couple of unlucky stoners.

What separates Pineapple Express from the bunch? What viewers will remember most are the best lead and one of the best supporting performances in the genre this year, but it's really the screenplay by Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, who also wrote last year's best comedy in Superbad that make this buzz so potent. Most comedy writers of recent years have been inspired by the juvenile humor of the Adam Sandler oeuvre or the gross-out success of the Farrelly brothers and the American Pie movies. Rogen and Goldberg dig deeper, writing a violent comedy much closer to the kind of action/comedies that they made more of in the '80s (think 48 Hours, Beverly Hills Cop, and Midnight Run). The closest comparison in recent years would be Quentin Tarantino and the way he blends extreme violence and gallows humor. Pineapple Express is an action comedy about a rare blend of marijuana and the film itself is a rarity, a unique buddy movie with an A-list director and an original worldview. Smoke down.

Rogen stars in Pineapple as Dale Denton, a schlub of a process server who loves his job because it allows him to smoke down between subpoenas and one of those mid-20s guys who doesn't see anything wrong with dating a high school senior. Dale buys his weed from Saul Silver, a brilliant creation brought to vivid life by James Franco, who needs to stop trying to make drama work and stick to what he does best with comedy. Saul spends his days watching 227 and secretly wishing he had a best friend. He likes Dale and sells him the cushiest dope he's got, the new, rare strain of the title. In a tragic coincidence, Dale happens to be heading to Saul's provider to give him a subpoena and, when he arrives, he watches Ted Jones (Gary Cole) and a cop (Rosie Perez) shoot an Asian man in the back of the head. He drops his roach as he escapes and the murderous Ted immediately identifies the stub as his sh*t and that means he can trace his witness back to Saul. That's some serious trouble for our heroes.

When it was announced that the excellent David Gordon Green (All the Real Girls, Undertow) would direct Pineapple Express, most people thought that was, well, an unusual choice. Pineapple Express is just further proof that Green can do absolutely anything he wants. It's his pacing of the dialogue and the smoke-down scenes that really provide the fuel for Pineapple. And his direction of the smaller roles, especially a scene-stealing Ed Begley Jr., is fantastic. Having said that, Green, Rogen, and Goldberg do kind of misplay the big action scenes. Pineapple Express gets pretty intense and I wished that the proceedings had a little more gravity. For the comedy-driven fight scenes, like an unbelievably great one between Rogen and Danny McBride, the lack of structure works. For the big sequences, it kind of drains the piece of a little energy. There's also no reason for Pineapple Express to be nearly two hours long. But, then again, potheads never do anything quickly.