Pineapple Express (2008)
Directed by David Gordon Green
A stoner and his dealer are forced to go on the run from the police after the pothead witnesses a cop commit a murder.
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The only thing I can think to compare Pineapple Express to is Midnight Run, which similarly mixed action and comedy in an unconventional but symbiotic manner.
The dumb, bantering hitman and doublecrossing friends recall Midnight Run.
In a sense, this harkens back to the "buddy flicks" so rampant in the 1980s, odd-couple outings like 48 HRS. and Midnight Run (no wonder iconic '80s band Huey Lewis and the News was tapped to belt out the closing-credits title song).
In the end, the film is solid entertainment in the Midnight Run vein.
It seems appropriate subject matter for a comedy that is itself a unique blend of action and comedy, the kind of buddy movie that they made a lot more of in the '80s (Midnight Run, 48 Hours, etc.), but that has kind of fallen out of style now that the Farrelly brothers and Will Ferrell have replaced dark humor with the gross-out variety in the "adult comedy" genre.
Despite its rusty mechanics and hodgepodge of tones, Pineapple Express convincingly imitates the mode of Midnight Run: on-the-run odd-couple comedy with gunplay and car chases.
In the pot movie canon, it's got the buddy vibe of the Harold & Kumar or Cheech & Chong films blended with the more laid-back, less-forced style of something like Dazed and Confused, and all of it directed by someone who knows how to handle violent comedy in the vein of the dark material made famous by Quentin Tarantino.
In Green's hands, one might expect a more introspective, artsy look at the drug scene, something more along the lines of Dazed and Confused (1993).
You have Richard Linklater's Dazed and Confused, Gregg Araki's Smiley Face , and now David Gordon Green's Pineapple Express.
The movie's too long - and the violence and mayhem are unexpectedly harsh and heavy - but Franco's inspired, looped performance is right up there in the annals of reefer filmdom with Jeff Bridges' the Dude in The Big Lebowski.
But to be blunt, the movie's aspiration to be the little doobie brother of "The Big Lebowski" doesn't click (a black-and-white prelude set in a 1937 military pot-testing lab is a very Coen brothers touch.)
As such, "Pineapple Express" is to action movies what "The Big Lebowski" was to film noir: a brilliant pastiche of the genre in which every classic set-up goes spectacularly off-track because the protagonists are always high!
At the same time, all the homages and blatant tips of the hat are a reminder of how well Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg pulled them off in last years brilliant Hot Fuzz (my choice for 2007s best, just ahead of Rogen in Knocked Up.)
It reminds me of "Hot Fuzz" in that there are certain satiric elements, but the main point is that the characters have seen the films in question and find themselves forced to emulate them.
In Hot Fuzz, the British team of Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg (Shaun of the Dead) mixed parody and gore in ways that made wheezy action-movie conventions feel invigoratingly strange.
Unlike the equally funny but much more cleverly structured "Hot Fuzz," the "Pineapple Express" filmmakers seem to forget for huge stretches of time that they're making an action picture.
The buddy-action-comedy genre is so done that when the rare gems such as "Kiss Kiss Bang Bang" and "Hot Fuzz" come along, they only make you wish that you could travel back in time to empty a clip of hollow-points into everyone responsible for the "Lethal Weapon" series before they could inflict it on anyone.
The film tries to fuse elements from the "Harold & Kumar" druggie comedies onto the violent buddy comedy-thriller "Hot Fuzz."
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No messy massacres like the one in Gus Van Sant's Elephant or political backstabbing à la Alexander Payne's Election.
It's also the best drug comedy since Cheech and Chong's salad days in Up in Smoke (1978).
As these things go, "Pineapple Express" is fitfully amusing but not up to the level of, say, Cheech and Chong's "Up in Smoke."
The first 20 minutes coast along on the fumes of Rogen's established likability and the surprise of seeing Franco playing Sean Penn's role from "Fast Times at Ridgemont High."
The appeal of funny stoners prancing around onscreen has its limits: There's a reason, for example, why Jeff Spicoli was not the central character in Fast Times at Ridgemont High.
After Dale witnesses a shooting, the two stoners and their cache of Pineapple Express get wrapped into a crime comedy-drama that's two parts Cheech and Chong and one part "To Live and Die in L.A.." It's reminiscent in tone of Doug Liman's underrated druggie dramedy "Go," except this movie is way less tightly paced, and has almost no major female characters.
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Not since the cinematic cannabis heyday of Jeff Spicoli ("Fast Times at Ridgemont High," 1982) and "Withnail & I" (1987) has a fully baked stoner come to such worthy comic life on-screen.
Jones sends in a pair of over-caffeinated thugs played by Kevin Corrigan and Craig Robinson - Abbott and Costello doing a remake of "Pulp Fiction."
One can detect traces of Police Academy, Pulp Fiction and The A-Team, plus Seventies-era cop shows like Mannix.
For those who don't think gore can be funny, consider the scene in Pulp Fiction where Vincent splatters brains all over the inside of a car.
These scenes are missing the energy that Tarantino brings to a scene like the adrenalin shot in Pulp Fiction or his writing of Natural Born Killers.
Not since “Pulp Fiction” plunged a needle in the heart of an overdose victim has drug comedy met drug violence with the pop of “Pineapple Express,” a stoner saga that manages the neat trick of being alternately as relaxed as an afternoon smoke session and as intense as a policeman’s pounding on the door.