PINEAPPLE EXPRESS

Another marijuana blockbuster

By DAVID WILDMAN

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This summer we've had two big, high-quality films with plots blatantly built around the use of marijuana: The Wackness and Pineapple Express. We've also got Barney Frank making a show of trying to legalize possession of the stuff. At this point in our culture, pot smoking seems on a par with downloading illegally from the internet—it's just another choice we have, an activity so widespread and familiar to young and old that its shock potential offers little more than a knowing wink.

These days, mainstream audiences can easily laugh at and accept characters like Pineapple Expresses' Saul Silver (James Franco), a bone-headed weed dealer starved for real friendship, and Dale Denton (Seth Rogen), a process server who gets high all day on the job. Basically, this is a mixture of buddy movie, a Cheech and Chong-like stoner romp and an action flick. At the outset, Dale is snobbish about socializing with his lowlife drug dealer Saul, but they smoke some super weed and Dale relents. He quickly unloads all his deepest personal misgivings about himself—he feels like an "ass-turd" dealing with his high school-aged girlfriend, and so on. Pot has provided the two with a bonding experience, and it continues to bind them together, for better or worse, throughout the rest of the film. Not long after that scene, Dale witnesses a murder by the local druglord and a cop, leading to him and his newfound dealer friend having to run for their lives from a wide assortment of baddies. Eventually, the rambling story leads to a showdown at an old abandoned underground military drug testing facility with lots of gunplay and explosions.

That's the bulk of the plot, but writers Rogen, Evan Goldberg and the ubiquitous Judd Apatow have crammed this thing full of insane rapid-fire dialogue; weed-related sight gags, crazy chases and kitchen-sink fight scenes. Director David Gordon Green follows a workman-like approach, keeping the focus on the action and the interplay, with little in the way of establishing shots. Indeed, Pineapple Express could be happening anywhere, although the cops do wear the uniform of Clark County, the same fictional place where Superbad took place.

The film would have failed if it were only an excuse to have a bunch of wild action scenes, but Rogen and company have taken on the difficult task of making you care about these characters, heavily satirizing their glaring faults while at the same time digging deep to show their human interior. The biggest concern becomes not whether our heroes will survive murderous gangsters, but whether they will decide that their friendship is based on anything more than just drugs. The interplay between Rogen as the (relatively) straight man and Franco as the drug-addled foil is witty and nuanced, and Franco proves a natural as he delivers a constant stream of nonsensical stoned out lines like "you've let the monkey out of the bottle."

The film's strong center makes up for some of the more peripheral problems, like the hackneyed choice of portraying some of the thugs as sensitive closet homosexuals. Here all the bad guys, including Gary Cole as the kingpin, Rosie Perez as a tough corrupt cop, and a large group of Asians playing rival gang members are mostly one-dimensional, broadly comic characters (although Perez, the only strong female lead, squeezes some substance out of her role through sheer willpower). Because of this, the threat to Dale and Saul never feels as real or intense as it might have.

But those are small gripes, and the laughs are huge throughout, so while Pineapple Express might not always be completely convincing or original, it sure as hell is a good time.

PINEAPPLE EXPRESS

RATED | R

OPENS | 8.6.08 AT REGAL FENWAY STADIUM, AMC LOEWS BOSTON COMMON, AMC LOEWS HARVARD SQ., AMC CHESTNUT HILL, SOMERVILLE THEATRE