Pineapple Express

The (fictitious) super-strong pot “Pineapple Express” plays a key role in Seth Rogen’s new film. It’s a bond between process server Dale Denton – Rogen – and his generous, eager-to-please dealer, Saul (James Franco). Saul is so excited by this new brand he’s desperate to share it with someone. If Dale isn’t a friend per se, at least he’s his most loyal customer.

The Express lives up to the hype, apparently, because it’s not long after lighting up that Dale starts making some seriously cloudy judgment calls. Witnessing a drug kingpin and a cop (Gary Cole and Rosie Perez) murder a rival, Dale panics, calls attention to himself, and flees – back to Saul, of all people. He also leaves behind a spliff, which because of PE’s novelty is guaranteed to lead the bad guys straight to Saul. (Even the permanently stoned dealer can work that one out.)

Right about now might be a good time to call a lawyer. But our fugitives have another idea. They decide to get lost – a goal well within their capabilities you might think, but not for long, even if they do manage to sleep through the best part of a day in stupefied bliss.

The trouble with most pot comedies is that they’re boring if you’re not on the same wavelength as the characters. By injecting stoner humour into a fairly straightforward action movie scenario Rogen and his Superbad cowriter Evan Goldberg are able to mix up quirky interludes of dozy non-sequiturs with the pumped up pleasures of slapstick carnage: brawls, car chases and shoot-outs.

The high and low, mellow and frantic approach may seem schizophrenic – the film does have an unusually stuttering rhythm – but who cares when there are so many big laughs?

Actually, scratch that. Director David Gordon Green obviously does, because he ensures the buddy relationship between our unreliable fugitives is threaded through the story with enough discreet conviction that it binds the whole together – even when the climax blows up into a Takashi Miike style action parody, it’s underpinned with the characters’ commitment to each other.

Credit James Franco for this too. A gifted actor who hasn’t been able to project much of the engaging personality he showed in Apatow’s TV show Freaks & Geeks into his leading man roles (in the Spider-man movies for example), he plays Saul’s befuddlement so sweetly you have to feel for the guy, even while you’re laughing at him.

It’s certainly an unexpected twist for Green, whose first two films were poetic mood pieces (George Washington and All the Real Girls), though he revealed a taste for drive-in style action in his third, Undertow. (A fourth, Snow Angels, has yet to be released here.)

I guess you could call Pineapple Express a sell-out on his part, but this Judd Apatow production shows just how intermingled the mainstream and the counterculture have become. The movie can be seen as pro or anti-drugs depending on your point of view, but the vibe is distinctly libertarian and anti-authoritarian.

Rogen sometimes seems more intent on mischief than he is on locating the funny bone – but I think it’s good for a comic to be a troublemaker. At the very least it’s disarming when our heroes raise cash by peddling cannabis to a group of 11-year-olds.

In its wisdom, the BBFC quietly persuaded Sony to drop the kicker for this scene: Saul and Dale lighting up and partying with the school kids. So I guess if we’re inclined to believe the children were merely buying the stuff for their parents then everything is okay?

The truth is, Pineapple Express is censor-proof. The dialogue is so relentlessly crude, even the BBFC’s own advisory on the film (which quotes some of it) would have been X-rated not so many years ago.

Not everything in the movie comes off, but Green seems to have encouraged a spontaneity and play that makes you happy to go with it – assuming you’re not too offended by the irresponsibility of it all.

Finally, a quick tip of the hat to Danny McBride, who really steals the show as Red, Saul’s less than trustworthy buddy. A former college friend of Green’s (he was on the crew of George Washington and played “Bust-Ass” in All the Real Girls) he’s the movie’s secret weapon, maybe the most authentically unreliable drug dealer in film history.

Tom Charity
tom.charty@lovefilm.com

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