Quotes of the Day
In the dog days, is it a critic's brain that goes soft, or just the movies he's paid to see? At this time of year, all films start blending into one: something about a comic book superhero with arrested-development issues who saves the world while making pee-pee jokes. Produced by Judd Apatow.
Our current entry, Pineapple Express, is more of the blow-'em-up, slap-happy same. Forget its similarities to earlier summer fare. This is one of two action films this month with mammoth, John Woo-movie-like explosions in parody form; next week's Tropic Thunder is the other. It is also the second movie this week in which a major plot point is an older man's promise to meet with his student girlfriend's parents. (Cf. Elegy, a romantic drama that has nothing else in common with Pineapple Express.) Finally, it's the third picture this summer, and the eighth in the past 14 months, that was produced, written or otherwise perpetrated by Apatow. Take a deep breath: Knocked Up, Superbad, Walk Hard, Drillbit Taylor, Forgetting Sarah Marshall, You Don't Mess With the Zohan, Step Brothers, Pineapple Express.
The actual inexhaustible force behind the new movie is Seth Rogen, the 26-year-old comedy prodigy (in a 45-year-old accountant's body) who has starred in Knocked Up, Superbad and Pineapple Express; co-wrote the last two, plus Drillbit Taylor, with his longtime pal Evan Goldberg, as well as co-producing them; and, presumably on weekends, provided voices for the animated films Horton Hears a Who and Kung Fu Panda and for the Hogsqueal character in The Spiderwick Chronicles. The characters he plays may be slackers, but in real life this guy is organized.
Working from Apatow's notion to graft an action-movie plot on a dope-movie premise, Rogen and Goldberg came up with a concoction that synthesizes the standard thrills of the first genre while exceeding the usual humor quotient of the second. Granted, that's not the toughest job, and Pineapple Express aims for nothing more than rowdy fun. Still, director David Gordon Green — who has made some terrific indie movies about isolated youths (George Washington, Snow Angels) and probably took this job cause he wanted to make a movie more than a handful of people would see — mixes all the ingredients to create a comedy that brings a nicely deflating note of realism to action-film mayhem, as well as being one of the few drug movies you don't have to be high to enjoy.
Rogen is Dale Denton, who works as a process server and plays at being the wise older beau to high-school senior Angie (Amber Heard). But his vocation is dope-smoking, which makes his dealer, Saul (James Franco), if not Dale's best friend then surely his most trusted business acquaintance. It's after a visit to Saul for some amazing weed known as Pineapple Express that Dale parks outside the home of his next subpoena victim, Ted Jones (Gary Cole). BLAM! go some guns, SPLAT! goes the body of an Asian man against the second-floor window, and CRUNCH! ZOOM! goes Dale's car in escape mode. (CRUNCH! because he's smashed two adjacent vehicles trying to make his getaway.) In his panic he dropped the marijuana cigarette he was toking — evidence that sends Ted and his gang tearing after Saul. The rest of the picture is a bunch of knowing, giggly riffs on action clichés in the hundreds of movies spawned by Lethal Weapon.
The gag here is that the two heroes engaged in the movie's requisite action scenes — the hand-to-hand combat, the car chase, the climactic military-style battle ending in a giant explosion — are klutzy boobs. Dale and Saul have the need and instinct to fight, drive and run, but none of the skills. One sequence, the movie's lamest, is either a demonstration of this theory or an undercutting commentary on it. As they stagger through the woods searching for a cell phone Saul has tossed away, Rogen and Franco take a stab at a slapstick routine but possess neither the precision nor the physical resilience to make it funny. (Nor the luck: Franco needed three stitches after he bumped into a tree.) The actors flounder like two Stooges in desperate need of a third.
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.
- Richard Corliss