Smart Stoners

The problem with stoner movies and action films is they routinely pander to brain-dead idiots.

It’s true. You idiots out there may argue, but what do you know? You have dead brains.

Yet, with Pineapple Express, the much anticipated marijuana comedy/action film from the comedy power team of Seth Rogen, Evan Goldberg and Judd Apatow, as well as the brilliant director David Gordon Green (George Washington, Snow Angels), these two usually mindless genres end up melding exceptionally well into a strain of film that feels at the same time fresh and retro.

Finally, a stoner movie that doesn’t let its characters off the hook for their idiotic actions and an action movie that shows the real world effects of a hero’s feats.

In Pineapple Express we see a character attempt to kick out a car’s windshield only to get his foot painfully stuck in the glass and potheads so out of shape that they can barely fight for their lives without pausing to take a breather.

If your neighborhood pot dealer got embroiled in a mob war and had to fight for their patchouli-scented existence, this is how I imagine it would go.

Almost despite itself, the film, scripted by Rogen and Goldberg, who teamed up on last year’s hilarious Superbad, works on more levels then you might think. It emphasizes humor based on character interactions over lame jokes about the munchies. (There is a bit of “traditional” drug humor here–coughing fits, etc.–but it’s enough to ignore.)

By the time the car chases begin and the guns go ablazing, we are so vested in the lives of the heroes that we would just watch them sitting around and talking about what’s on television. Seeing them flee from crooked cops and sell pot to teenagers in broad daylight is a bonus.

The plot is merely an excuse to get the characters off the couch, but here it goes: Rogen plays Dale Denton, a man in his mid-20s so stuck in arrested development that he still thinks it’s cool to date cheerleaders…high school ones.

His low-level pot dealer, Saul Silver (James Franco showing exemplary comic timing as he teams up with Rogen again, years after their much-beloved show Freaks and Geeks left the air), is a lovable goof so deluded that he thinks because Dale comes by once a week to stock up on weed that they are best friends.

Saul tries to bribe friendship out of Dale by selling him an extremely rare strain of weed called (titular line alert) Pineapple Express. It’s so rare, in fact, that once Dale accidentally witnesses a mob murder, the killer is able to track the pot back to Saul by just one whiff of the joint Dale leaves behind. Sure.

That’s when the real story kicks into “high” gear. In a fit of paranoia Dale and Saul take off, grabbing snacks first, before dudes with guns kick in their door. For once their drug-induced paranoia pays off as they ineptly try to evade getting killed.

The scenes of Dale and Saul becoming friends and trying to make sense of their situation are the foundation of the movie and we get plenty of scenes of the two fully realized characters just sitting and chatting, whether it’s hiding in a tree or listening to NPR together in the car.

It’s a classic buddy-movie pairing, Rogen as the sort-of straight man and Franco as the comic relief. The pairing of the two is so strong that they could have a long career ahead of them as a comedy duo. It really works.

The real surprise of the film isn’t the already established chops of Rogen and crew, but of director David Gordon Green. Anyone who has seen his indie masterpieces already knows he is a genius at making dramatic films.

But now, jumping head first into not one, but two, new genres he proves that he really is a born filmmaker. The film shows great restraint in camera work and editing with few wasted scenes and no shots that draw attention away from the action. The film works as a cohesive whole and builds and builds in a way that few films can. I can’t recall a point in the movie (other then the unnecessary opening scene) where I wasn’t completely immersed in the story.

Pineapple Express is the comedy film of this year and an achievement that is rare in Hollywood. It is a film that doesn’t trod through on autopilot, giving the audience more than it expects and breathing new life into genres that have been on life support for some time.

Pineapple Express****Opens today