Dale Denton, played by Seth Rogen, and Saul Silver (James Franco), battle gangs, flames and their own klutziness in Pineapple Express.
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Moe soon shows up in the person of Red (Danny McBride), the drug middleman who has sent Ted's mob looking for Saul. When Dale and Saul find Red, they get into a three-way face-off so prolonged and punishing, it's the flip side of one of Matt Damon's Bourne fights, using every living-room implement as a weapon while running at one another like drunken walruses. (Rogen fractured a finger during this scene; McBride, Rogen says, "cracked his head open.") It happens that McBride is, like, the fourth funniest person in the free world, and he turns this chronic liar and betrayer into a blithely likable fellow. You'll see the actor in another scene-stealing role as an explosions expert in Tropic Thunder. And when McBride sports a beard, he kind of looks like Judd Apatow; that can't hurt his career prospects.
Though Franco got his first big notices playing James Dean in a TV movie, and is best known for oozing adolescent angst as Peter Parker's nemesis Harry Osborn in the Spider-Man movies, he and Rogen share some comedy history; they were both in the cast of Apatow's teen TV series, Freaks and Geeks back in the last millennium. Franco makes for an agreeably louche presence, playing Cheech to Rogen's Chong, Bill to his Ted: the one person lower on the real-world food chain than Dale. Gee, a process server! "I wish I had a job like that," he effuses, in an innocent burst of subpoena envy.
For Saul, dealing dope is not so much a job, more a sacred mission; he musters a hushed reverence for the product Saul is pushing. He shows Dale a "cross joint" — a cigarette-size marijuana stick inserted perpendicularly into a hole in a cigar-size one — and declares it "the apex of the vortex of joint engineering." He turns poetic in limning the virtues of Pineapple Express. "It smells like God's vagina," he says, in a joke that crystallizes the Rogen-Goldberg mode of humor: find a phrase that whose naughtiness is almost matched by its mystico-feminist profundity. It gets extra points for the "huh" factor: the near-certainty that, in written or spoken history, those two words never collided before.
At heart, though, Pineapple Express isn't a dope movie; it's a movie about the wages of dope. Dale and Saul spend less time being stoned than in trying not to get stoned, mutilated and perforated by the Jones mob and its deadly rivals, the Asian gang. But it is a movie about dopes: goofy guys, born without the ambition gene, and who would not survive a minute in the drug world, or the real one, without the guardian angel of a scriptwriter hovering to think them out of scrapes.
Eh, so what? Virtually every movie tends to celebrate the characters it displays. And since Rogen and Franco are princes of affability, nobody watching Pineapple Express is going to give Dale and Saul demerits for slovenly citizenship as they go through the paces of bonding, breaking up and rebonding that is mandatory in an Apatow-Rogen comedy. Plus the scene where the two men have virtual sex; you know that one's coming. Plus some drug jokes that are very dope.
Which is to say it's your basic late-summer movie, whose modest amusements will keep kids and parents from thinking that school starts in a few weeks. That's the season critics look forward to: when the blur of superheroes and slackers gives way to serioso films with Oscar intentions. No doper films in there — those are movies that want to get high on I.Q.