Dazed and confused

This stoner comedy is muddled - and not because of the high-grade weed

Pineapple Express

By Ryan Gilbey Published 11 September 2008

Do you have a fondness for the dazed comedies of the 1970s stoner duo Cheech and Chong? Are your shelves groaning under the weight of rubbish 1980s action flicks featuring Chuck Norris, "Rowdy" Roddy Piper and other meatheads with "straight to video" stamped on their birth certificates? Do you harbour a deep and unquestioning love for Seth Rogen, the Knocked Up star who resembles Fozzie Bear?

If you answered "yes" to all these questions, you are either: a) Seth Rogen, or b) the ideal viewer for his higgledy-piggledy comedy-thriller Pineapple Express, which gathers all the aforementioned elements into one ungainly roll-up that never quite catches fire. Rogen, who co-wrote the script, plays Dale, a thirtysomething spliffhead who's dating Angie (Amber Heard), a high-school cheerleader-type who can't stop telling him how witty and desirable he is. One of the perks of being both screenwriter and performer is that you can nab yourself a plum role like this, just as one of the perks of being in the audience is that you can call out at the screen: "Dream on."

Dale scores some potent weed - the "pineapple express" of the title - from his dealer, Saul (James Franco), whose dulled reflexes and delayed reactions never quite conceal his joyfulness; he's like Tigger on tranquillisers. But when Dale witnesses a murder and leaves his joint at the scene of the crime, Saul is smart enough to know they should scram before the evidence is traced back to them. It's a nifty conceit: the panic inherent in any thriller is amplified to comic proportions by plain old dope-fuelled paranoia.

The film's violence becomes both bloodier and more cartoonish as the killers close in on Dale and Saul - a Dust Buster and a cactus are deployed as deadly weapons during one fracas, while characters are shot at point-blank range, some dying gruesomely, others surviving improbably. Since Pulp Fiction, audiences have taken their violence with a chaser of laughing gas, but even in this ambivalent climate, Pineapple Express feels confused. Perhaps its oddball violence is supposed to evoke a strung-out, narcotic sensibility, in which case it pales beside Alex Cox's Repo Man or the Coen brothers' Big Lebowski, which also took their stylistic cues from their characters' drugs of choice.

Or maybe the film is lampooning the Lethal Weapon series and its ilk, where the hero might typically despatch the entire New York mafia with his bare hands mere moments after being pummelled, electrocuted and subjected to a regime of vicious wedgies. If so, the send-up is too soft to make any impression, the line between pastiche and paean so faint as to be negligible.

Pineapple Express could be described as a film of surprises, not all of them pleasant. Finding David Gordon Green, known for pastoral dramas such as George Washington and All the Real Girls, at the helm of this slapstick throwback is akin to discovering that David Fincher has revived the Porky's series, or that Paul Thomas Anderson is remaking Police Academy. Green keeps the pace unhurried and smuggles in a few Seventies-style zoom-shots, but it's hardly what you'd call an artistic vision.

Franco, on the other hand, comes through with a performance of striking comic clarity as the charmingly fuzzy Saul. He even brings warmth to the buddy-buddy clichés that litter the script, and which, like the violence, are indulged too lovingly to rank as simple tomfoolery. "They say, 'Don't dip the pen in the company ink,'" Saul tells Dale, his client-turned-friend. "But I'm totally glad I dipped in your ink, bro."

Any homoeroticism here is intentional, and might even be amusing, if it wasn't bound up with the film's misogyny. That's a harsh word, and one that has been used, unfairly in my opinion, against Rogen's previous work (Knocked Up, Superbad). But the treatment of Angie in Pineapple Express is plain sleazy. First, Rogen makes his character irresistible to this barely legal schoolgirl, then he is shown casually insulting and discarding her in favour of his new best pal. It feels as if the writer is settling some unspecified off-screen scores. I was going to suggest this could be another attempt to satirise action films, with their cavalier mistreatment of women, but you'd have to be on something stronger than pineapple express to swallow that one.