Pineapple Express
| Year: | 2008 |
| Production Co: | Apatow Productions |
| Director: | David Gordon Green |
| Producer: | Judd Apatow |
| Writer: | Seth Rogen/Evan Goldberg/Judd Apatow |
| Cast: | Seth Rogen, James Franco, Danny McBride, Gary Cole, Rosie Perez, Amber Heard, Ed Begley Jr, Bill Hader |
The most impressive thing about this movie was how to take such a thin premise and flesh it out so that 90 minutes of it didn't get boring.
The execution of such a feat was made possible by the Apatow bran of comedy, a lot of people just talking and being themselves in the way we all are but which is funny when you have the right characters doing it.
In this case the right characters are pothead subpoena server Dale (Rogen) and his weed dealer Saul (Franco), in a stoner/slacker role a world away from Spider-Man and Flyboys. He's actually much funnier than Rogen's bumbling everydude, perpetually stoned and with little idea what's going on around him.
When Dale gets a crop of the best new stuff in town from Saul and drops it in terror outside the house of a mobster after seeing a gang hit, the mobster (Cole) and his crooked cop cohort (Perez) trace the errant joint back to Saul as they know he's the only one in town who has Pineapple Express, as the new strain is termed.
The chase that ensues is highly slapstick and gives Rogen and Franco the elbowroom to really bounce off each other and assert their comic talents, then it veers off into Hot Fuzz territory, lampooning the action genre by turning nasty and violent and feeling like it belongs in another movie.
The disjointedness doesn't matter so much though because it's all about the laughs, and there are plenty.
The execution of such a feat was made possible by the Apatow bran of comedy, a lot of people just talking and being themselves in the way we all are but which is funny when you have the right characters doing it.
In this case the right characters are pothead subpoena server Dale (Rogen) and his weed dealer Saul (Franco), in a stoner/slacker role a world away from Spider-Man and Flyboys. He's actually much funnier than Rogen's bumbling everydude, perpetually stoned and with little idea what's going on around him.
When Dale gets a crop of the best new stuff in town from Saul and drops it in terror outside the house of a mobster after seeing a gang hit, the mobster (Cole) and his crooked cop cohort (Perez) trace the errant joint back to Saul as they know he's the only one in town who has Pineapple Express, as the new strain is termed.
The chase that ensues is highly slapstick and gives Rogen and Franco the elbowroom to really bounce off each other and assert their comic talents, then it veers off into Hot Fuzz territory, lampooning the action genre by turning nasty and violent and feeling like it belongs in another movie.
The disjointedness doesn't matter so much though because it's all about the laughs, and there are plenty.