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Judd Apatow may be becoming the Brandon Tartikoff of our time -- Tartikoff being the late NBC executive famous for two-or-three-word brainstorms which he would hand over to people to make happen.
Example: "MTV + Cops" equalled Miami Vice.
Apatow's orders some years back to Seth Rogen and his Superbad writing partner Evan Goldberg were equally vague and oxymoronic: write a "pot-action comedy."
Now "pot" and "action" are pretty much mutually exclusive. And I suspect Rogen and Goldberg were stoned when they wrote Pineapple Express. Said condition may have continued through the shoot and all the way through to the editing room.
The result is a "pot comedy" that is action-packed to the extent that Harold and Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay was (although with rather more firepower).
It is uneven, overly long, makes utterly no sense -- but still manages to work as stoner escapism with a lot of pretty explosions.
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It allows some worthy comic supporting actors (Danny McBride, The Office's Craig Robinson) to chew scenery as if they had the world's worst case of "the munchies," even as it treats its female cast (Rosie Perez, Amber Heard) as third wheels (this is still the Apatow boys' club).
In fact, Pineapple Express is most enjoyable before the action even starts.
After a Reefer Madness-esque opening about military marijuana experiments in the '30s, we meet Rogen-stock-character Dale, a summons server who performs his job with flair -- even though he's stoned most of the day. In between, he's carrying on inappropriately with a high school girl named Angie (Heard) who's several years his junior, and resisting meeting her parents for obvious reasons.
Pot being the glue that holds his life together, he's forced into a friendly relationship with a space-case drug dealer named Saul (James Franco, in his first comedy since the TV series Freaks and Geeks). Saul spends his time inventing new forms of joints (including a four-ended spliff that looks like a genetic mistake) and dissecting the humour of the '80s Sherman Hemsley sitcom 227.
There is an element of realism to all this -- the forced conviviality of dealer and client, the impatience of the latter to just make the deal and go. It happens that on this day, Saul has some experimental new produce, a Hawaiian strain called Pineapple Express, which Dale takes on his next job.
Said job is unfortunately at the home of a drug kingpin (Gary Cole), who with a corrupt-cop accomplice (Perez), commits a murder which Dale witnesses. Dale gets away, but leaves a sample of the bud, which Cole's character immediately identifies on smell alone and tracks down to Saul.
So it is with that the movie becomes Run, Buddy Run -- neither Dale nor Saul safe standing still (inexplicably, they are now best friends). With that, Pineapple Express breaks form and becomes an endless array of car chases, crashes, concussive head smacks, fights, gunplay (one character is shot more than a dozen times, and keeps getting up for comic effect). It's like a red-eyed Three Stooges movie with no end in sight until Huey Lewis sings the eponymous theme song.
In bits and pieces, there's some fitfully funny stuff in Pineapple Express.
For that reason, although it'll probably do well in the theatres on expectation alone, it will likely have a healthy life on DVD, where the extras and stoned humour will play better.
Superbad it ain't.
(This film is rated 18-A)