Pineapple Express -- Hot Fuzz for Stoners

August 10 2008 23:31 Filed in: Movies
How about a stoner comedy with Seth Rogan and the dude that played the Goblin in the Spiderman movies? Okay, let’s give it a shot!

The first trailer I saw for Pineapple Express was a brief “clean” TV ad that really glossed over the fact that this was a “stoner” comedy. I’m not opposed to stoner comedies, but as I grow elder, the idea is just more “bleh” than anything.

Not that I still don’t get blasphemous delight in revisiting Cheech and Chong classics or a myriad of particularly well done others over the years, but I still kind of like a real movie around it. Fortunately, Pineapple Express makes good and is self-billed as the first “stoner action comedy.”

It’s very much in the same style of last year’s phenomenally clever and entertaining and Hot Fuzz. However, Pineapple Express isn’t nearly as slick and fun as the aforementioned, but it still manages to deliver what it advertises for the most part.

Many movies I see that try to tread lines between multiple genres have what I consider a personal Moment of Truth. Most of the time, this comes for me in a comedy. As silly it sounds, this moment will serve to convince me to accept what the film is selling and make the leap to buy into it or not.

For Pineapple Express, that moment comes quite a while into the film. Our main characters, played Seth Rogan and James Franco are involved in a scuffle with one of the movie’s goofy supporting characters. During the course of the struggle one of the characters ends up beating another with a rechargeable hand vac. That moment, in context, is the point where I just gave up and said, okay, this is just too damned silly not to like. From that point, I was sold and it had passed the goofball test for me because that’s where I was able to break the several smiles I had up to that point into to an audible chuckle.

The story follows Rogan’s character, a Process Server whose job is to serve and deliver legal documents such as subpoenas to unwilling recipients. Rogan unwittingly ends up witness to a murder and turns to his drug dealer, James Franco, for some help.

The two end up inadvertently igniting a drug war between Asian mobsters and a local drug lord played by Gary Cole. Cole is another bright spot and one of those actors that I’m drawn to in strong supporting roles. In this, even though he’s pivotal to the story, he’s underutilized.

One of the film’s weaknesses is an underdeveloped subplot with Rogan’s girlfriend and her family being forced into hiding because of the mess. It does finally resolve itself, but I feel like it probably could have been tapped a little better. The bright side of that is that we get a very funny cameo from Ed Begley jr as the girlfriend’s father. I was disappointed that they never came back to him since he was initially integral to the subplot.

Overall, the movie never takes completely off but keeps moving with fairly consistent chuckles and a handful of good laughs along with characters that you do want to emotionally invest in for a while.

If you do decide to go see it, please, unlike the group of people behind me in the theater, shut the hell up and enjoy the movie.

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