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David Gordon Green, Pineapple Express

by Kathryn Durfee
08/30/2008

Around this same time last year, writing buddies Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg conquered the August heat by entertaining audiences with high-school comedy Superbad. Their latest project, Pineapple Express, is a darker and more violent buddy comedy than Superbad, here our heroes are chasing the perfect high and being chased by rival drug lords, giving new meaning to the paranoid pothead.

A little weary of the Judd Apatow brand, I had my doubts about Pineapple Express. Knocked Up grossed out the guys (thanks for sharing, Katharine Heigl) but didn't win the hearts of the girls, Superbad reduced audiences to 15-year-old boys, and Forgetting Sarah Marshall had a little too much of Jason Segel's sad manhood. So, you can't really blame me for lowering my expectations after seeing a trailer for Pineapple Express in which stoner James Franco exclaims that the titular drug "smells like God's vagina."

Oh, how wrong I was. Director David Gordon Green, known better for his dark dramas (Snow Angels) than for any sort of gross-out comedy, brings a little bit of the macabre to Pineapple Express, making it both violently funny and thrilling. The violence shows that Green might need a little more practice in the comedy genre though, as it doesn't quite fit the mood established by the comic levity of the first half of the film.

As for the story, we've got Seth Rogen starring as Dale Denton, a process server who makes his job more bearable by being as stoned as possible as often as possible. He gets his drugs from James Franco's Saul Silver, a lonely but kind-hearted dealer sporting an ancient Jaws t-shirt and striped pajama-style pants. The brotherly love begins to show when Saul shares a bit of top-shelf product, called pineapple express, with his favorite customer Denton. This blend of pot is so unmistakable that when Denton witnesses a murder while delivering legal papers and throws his joint into the street, he and Saul are immediately targeted, via middleman Red (Danny McBride) by drug lord Ted Jones (Gary Cole).

Though Dale isn't about to call Saul his best friend, he certainly doesn't want to bring any harm to anyone involved, and the two take off into the night. After destroying their cell phones and spending a night in the woods, they decide to pay a visit to Red. This is when the buddy comedy about potheads that could have been written by the characters from "Superbad" turns violent. Red's apartment is destroyed, blood is shed, and bones are broken, only to find out that he has already fingered Saul to Jones. Embroiled in a drug war between Jones, who has the cops on his side, namely female cop Carol (Rosie Perez), and the gang known fittingly vaguely as "the Asians," Dale and Saul realize that this isn't the normal brand of weed-fueled paranoia and that their lives really are in danger.

For a film that is so tightly put together throughout its first half, it was surprising to watch it come apart at the seams in the latter. Throughout the Jones-Carol subplot, it appears as though the actors weren't aware of what type of film they were in, failing to bring comic levity to the ridiculous situations. The level of violence is high here (no pun intended), and Green's cinematographer Tim Orr shoots with an unsteady hand-held that gives the film a Bourne-ish feel during fight scenes that is missing from the rest of the film. Once the guys make it to Jones's lair, all hope for a good script and story go out the window; everyone needs to die, and they need to do so violently. Thank God for the laugh-packed first half of the film and the final diner scene, which together save Pineapple Express from slipping away into a bloody mess.

Speaking of the laughs, most of them come from Franco's lovable but hopeless Saul Silver. Selling pot to make sure his grandmother can stay in a nice retirement home, audiences can't help but feel for Saul and his misguided ways. Franco brings a level of complete believability to the role, enabling Saul to be able to both throw his cell phone into the woods in hopes that it would deter the cops and use the word "insinuating" without either seeming out of character or surprising the viewer.

Rogen works well as hapless Dale, but he doesn't bring anything new to the table in the film - a Seth Rogen role is a Seth Rogen role. One of Apatow's major successes has been his ability to put men like Seth Rogen (and Forgetting Sarah Marshall's Jason Segel) in the spotlight as leading romantic figures or heroes. Jason Segel, however, brought a little more heart to his role in Marshall than Rogen does here.

Third wheel Danny McBride should not be forgotten, as some of the bigger laughs come from his rednecky Red, who learns to forgive and forget even while losing massive amounts of blood.

Violence and mid-film sloppiness aside, Pineapple Express proves to be an entertaining summer movie that, like all Apatow movies, emphasizes the fact that the most important relationship (even more important than stoner and dealer) is that between two male friends. Just because the stakes have been raised and the substance escalated, the message is the same as it was in Superbad : never leave a buddy behind on the quest for substance abuse.

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