Review: Pineapple Express

Could this movie have been made even three years ago? Every time I saw the trailer, that's all I could think about. Well, that and the fact that "Paper Planes" is one of the best songs I've heard in years, but I digress. Break this down purely as a premise: A dedicated stoner and his drug dealer run afoul of the two warring local mobs, and go on the run, while continually smoking a lot of weed and engaging in action movie-level fights. I mean, this sounds like the premise for the third Harold and Kumar movie, but even so, I can't imagine this being pitched to a studio and selling.

But then, a funny thing happened: Judd Apatow became Hollywood's golden boy over the past year or so, churning out hit after hit (and "Walk Hard," which still wasn't that bad), and now, we have a major summer tentpole action movie starring Seth Rogen and James Franco, the latter of whom is best known as the second Green Goblin in the "Spider-Man" movies. Even stranger is the fact that this works, perfectly.

In its own way, "Pineapple Express" is at once a subversion of the traditional action movie formula, and a celebration of it. The final sequence is not only shockingly violent for a comedy (more on that in a minute), but wouldn't feel out of place in a Will Smith movie, circa 1998. Even before this, the madness includes a three-way brawl in an apartment, a car chase and a few other sequences that feel like they belong in a "Rush Hour" sequel, not a stoner movie.

That's the trick, though, and the reason this movie works: Most "stoner movies" are content to mine 12-year-old-skewing idiocy and the hilarity of watching stoners be stoned, and call it a film. The problem is, stoners being stoned are, as a standalone, not all that funny. The humor is purely situational, and that is why films like the "Harold and Kumar" movies and "The Big Lebowski" work so well; much like your average stoner, a little intelligence makes the whole thing a lot more interesting and entertaining.

The other major reason that this film works so well is James Franco. As Saul Silver, he is absolutely phenomenal. In a summer where marquee movies have yielded Oscar-caliber performances, Franco should at the very least be in the conversation for a Supporting Actor nod. He absolutely steals the film every time he appears onscreen, and might be the most dead-on movie stoner ever. The best example is a scene in which Saul is talking to Dale (Rogen), and when Dale tells him about his job as a process server, Saul just struggles to keep up, sporting a half-lidded gaze and picking random words like "moustache" and "disguise" out of the conversation, and eventually reaching the conclusion that Dale is a butler. Later, when Dale flips out at Saul for getting them into the mess they find themselves in, Franco's heartbreak is genuinely distressing. This is the kind of pathos usually reserved for heavier material, but like many of the other Apatow leads, Rogen and Franco don't limit themselves to a certain level of performance, just because this is "only" a comedy.

But then, is it, really? After watching the film, I couldn't figure out whether it was a really violent comedy or a really funny action movie. Most comedies, even action comedies, don't have a prominent supporting character taking a coffee pot to the face, or a main character suffering an injury that will remind some of the nastiest scene in "Resevoir Dogs." However, where some critics have cried foul regarding this abrupt jumping of tone, I think they're just having trouble accepting that the Apatow gang is branching out; if Quentin Tarantino had directed this movie (which, at a couple points, it seems like he could have), heavy-handed reviews would have examined the subtext drawn from juxtaposing violence with laughs. Thankfully, we'll be spared.

One final note: I'm sure that before long, people are going to raise a fuss about how this movie glorifies drug use. I disagree; it's about two people caught up in a mess they don't know how to deal with, and the fact that they smoke a lot of weed is just a part of their characters. Plus, let's face it: Between the anti-heroism of "Iron Man," the bleak, hopeless struggles of "The Dark Knight," this movie and next week's "Tropic Thunder" bringing back blackface, a lot of childhoods are already being ruined this summer. If anything, this might scare a few kids away from weed.