Pineapple Express

When people mention Pineapple Express, it is usually in the same breath as Superbad and occasionally Knocked Up. Granted, Evan Goldberg and Seth Rogen were behind all three movies (to varying degrees) and they all come from the Apatow stable - which is now enjoying the inevitable backlash from critics - but to call it a follow-up and imply a more-of-the-same attitude is to do it a disservice. Pineapple Express is not another teen comedy or another frat-boy-comes-of-age movie, where the characters find themselves in embarrassing, socially awkward situations and generally make fools of themselves, while having the breathing room to improv and riff off each other with hilarious results.

No, Pineapple Express is a very different beast. It's a 'genre' movie bringing with it all the associated challenges. It's an Action Comedy. It's a Stoner Action Comedy to be more specific. For a stoner action comedy you're gonna need a significant plot, you're gonna need lengthy elaborate action sequences, you're gonna need the obligatory smoking sequences and cheap stoner gags and on top of that you're gonna need to be funny, so funny in fact, that you don't suffer in comparison to Superbad. That's a tall order. How did they set about achieving it? Well, by doing almost everything differently, something to be roundly applauded.

They keep the plot fairly simple; Seth Rogen's pot-smoking loser, witnesses a murder and has to go on the run with his dealer, getting unwittingly caught up in a war between 2 rival drug gangs in the process. As far as the, action sequences go they stick rigidly to one rule. These guys are not action stars! They are stoners! So we have no athletic, quick-thinking bad-ass action moves, followed by comedic quips ala Lethal Weapon or Rush Hour. Instead the comedy comes from their complete inability to achieve anything remotely physical. There is one sequence in which the pugilists even seem incapable of hurting each other because they are completely lacking in any physical prowess, ingenuity, strength or athleticism. Apparently the idea for this movie came from asking, what if the bad guys had chased Brad Pitt in True Romance instead of Christian Slater. Just like Lebowski was thrown into a Film Noir plot for comedy gold, they throw two everyman stoners into a convoluted action movie set-up and have them react almost realistically to every situation i.e. with utter panic, inarticulacy and incompetence. These guys are not Mel Gibson.

As far as the stoner comedy goes, there almost is none. Don't get us wrong, they mine the fact that the characters are stoned in the most inappropriate situations for all it's worth. They just don't assume for one moment that smoking weed in itself is funny. It's all about the context. One example: Smoking weed = boring. Selling weed to 12-year-olds to get money to flee town, smoking it with them, thinking you're cool but ultimately getting so stoned that you get caught by the police = funny.

In all this perhaps accidental innovation, they don't quite achieve everything. They don't achieve the same comedy hit rate that Superbad managed as they just aren't allowed spend as much time mining for laughs. Also, the success of the their previous efforts has often been down to the audience getting to spend time with a group of friends who have a ready-made sense of humour complete with recognisable rivalries, resentments and raillery. This is more about the burgeoning of a friendship rather than the exploration of an existing one. And yet again Rogen and Goldberg have tooled their script as a love story between two males. Of course buddy comedies always have that undercurrent (witness the countless Brokeback Mountain trailer parodies) but Pineapple Express - and Superbad before it - dispense with the coyness and overtly set up the relationship of a weed smoker and his dealer as essentially a fuck-buddy relationship that turns into love. The attempt to invest this friendship with such metaphorical undertones (or overtones) illustrates the care and attention to detail and the desire to do something a little different with the genre that permeates the whole enterprise and sets it apart from a turgid Ratner rip-off. Still, to step all over our original point, it's no Superbad.

3/5