Review: ‘Pineapple Express’ is a high old time
(CNN) — Producer Judd Apatow continues his popular assault on common decency in Pineapple Express, an R-rated celebration of recreational drugs, anti-authoritarianism and mindless violence.
If the R is meant to signal mature content, most teenagers will know better. These days it’s hip to take both the high road and the low, and Mr. Apatow and his gang — including Seth Rogen, James Franco and a new addition, director David Gordon Green — will be laughing all the way to the bank.
Rogen, who co-wrote the film’s screenplay with his Superbad partner Evan Goldberg, stars as Dale Denton, a process server. He wears a suit, dates a high school student 10 years his junior, and dreams of having his own talk radio show — most of which would have qualified him as the enemy in a Cheech and Chong flick.
However, he does smoke a lot of pot — 10 joints a day. Weed makes everything better, he declares with the air of one who has studied the subject inside and out. (The title, Pineapple Express, refers to a type of particularly potent marijuana in the film.)
Letting his hair down for once — and more engaging for it — is James Franco as Saul Silver, Dale’s helplessly genial supplier and default buddy (evidently neither is well-off for friends). When Dale witnesses a drug kingpin and a dirty cop (Gary Cole and Rosie Perez) shoot a rival, it’s Saul he runs to — one of several glaring leaps in logic that can only be excused by his near-permanent mental fog. Saul’s a sweet guy, but he has the street smarts of roadkill.
So what we have here is a stoner action comedy, an unusual hybrid that — for good reason — hasn’t exactly been attempted before. But Pineapple Express draws plentiful absurdist energy from the chaos.
