Pineapple Express - Is a Mess

Pineapple Express had a lot of things going for it and a lot of things going against it, and unfortunately the things going against it prevailed.

The action-comedy, whether you realize it or not, is one of the most difficult genres to work in.  It walks not only the comedic tightrope (which is the tightest rope of all, considering you have to make people laugh after all the shit they've been through that day) but also the thriller tightrope, wherein you have to excite them.  This after they've seen a car blow up every which way, a thousand car chases, knees to the groin, kicks to the groin, fists to the groin, head butts to the groin, gunshots to the groin, and all matter of blood, guts and gore.  This after they've seen all 21 installments of the James Bond franchise, and 3 Jason Bourne movies to boot.

So in order to make a successful action-comedy, the number one requirement is not that it be funny or action packed, but that the buddy cops or buddy criminals (or in this case, buddy pot heads) be likable.  For this, Pineapple Express has been blessed with the very funny, very charming, and very polar-opposite pair of Dale Denton (played by Seth Rogen) and Saul Silver (played by James Franco).  I could watch these guys get stoned and play video games all day.  It would take the edge off just hanging out with these guys.

Then you have to come up with a plot.  Pineapple Express is The Defiant Ones meets Miami Vice, with our hapless heroes caught in the middle of two feuding drug factions.  That's funny enough, if it's handled well.  You can have machine guns blazing all day, and people getting shot, and explosions and death, and the movie can still be funny if it's handled properly.  Witness Midnight Run, one of the funniest movies I've seen, a film filled with action, explosions, Robert De Niro destroying a helicopter with a few shots from his pistol, and the f-bomb dropped probably 150 times.  There are big laughs all throughout this picture, and the action never becomes grim, and the violence never detracts from the humor.  Witness the first two Lethal Weapon movies and the first two Die Hard movies.  Filled with violence, explosions, blood, guts, and brains splattering all over the camera.  And they're all rather funny.  They were written, directed, acted, and edited with precise timing.  And precise timing is not all that necessary in an action film.  It is, however, completely necessary for a comedy.

Let's look at a bad action-comedy.  Bad Boys II for instance.  Loaded with blood, guts, action, profanity, explosions, etc.  Two and a half hours worth, in fact.  That's about two and a half hours too many for a film that is not funny, and is, in fact, so tactless that it is racist, sexist,  crude, and unethical.  It is a film that just made me feel dirty.  A lot of that had to do with the director, Michael Bay, the screenwriters, Ron Shelton and Jerry Stahl, and the actors, Martin Lawrence and Will Smith.  I imagine Lawrence and Smith at one time read the script.  I don't think they went into it blind.  And Michael Bay must have read the script at some point.  I just don't understand why none of them said no.  They must have thought improvisation was the key to making a victory out of a defeat, and improvisation is never successful completely on its own.  It has to be backed up by something.

If you want to look at some more bad action-comedies, just rent any of the Beverly Hills Cop movies.  They're all equally terrible, even the first one, which somehow garnered an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Screenplay back in 1984.  They are terrible for several reasons, not the least of which that they are not funny.

One of the many keys to directing a successful action-comedy is the balance of the action with the comedy.  That is more difficult than directing drama.  That is more difficult than directing comedy.  And that is more difficult than directing action.  And that is the main reason Pineapple Express is a mess.

I like David Gordon Green.  I cherish several of his movies.  Snow Angels is one of the best films so far this year (You can read my review of it here.), and All the Real Girls is one of the great romantic dramas of this generation.  I knew going into Pineapple Express that its greatest hurdle would be the relative inexperience of Green in directing action and comedy, let alone the two together.  There is nothing in his previous four films that suggests he would be capable of handling action or comedy, and as Pineapple Express progressed, I realized there was nothing in it that suggested that either.

The film begins well with the introduction of Dale Denton, a pot-smoking process server who is carrying on a romance with a 17 year old high school student.  Dale is out of pot and goes to see his low on the totem pole dealer, Saul, who has just received a shipment of the rarest pot on earth, Pineapple Express.  Saul is an interesting cat, and is portrayed by Franco as so fried out of his mind that we are unsure (and Saul is probably unsure) if he is a homosexual.  These homosexual tendencies continue through the entire movie and involve nearly all of the characters (except Rosie Perez, and only then because she is a she), and by the end credits, I was pretty sure I had seen the gayest film since 300.

Anyway, after introducing the clueless heroes, we are given a plot.  Dale goes to the house of the high on the totem pole drug dealer (played by Gary Cole), and arrives just in time to witness him execute an Asian from the rival drug clan.  Thus, he must run for his life from drug dealing assassins while caught in the middle of the drug clans' war.

Not that there was any reason for him to run in the first place, seeing as how neither Cole nor Perez (as a crooked cop) knows who he is or where he lives, but whatever - if they didn't get him running, there would be no movie.  Anyway, Dale goes back to Saul's place and convinces him that they should grab some fruit roll-ups and some weed and get the hell out of there before someone kicks in the door and kills them.

This next section of the film is the only one that works, and it contains the film's only real laughs, as neither Dale nor Saul has any friends they can hang out with, and neither of them has any money for a hotel room since they're both losers, so all they can think of to do is go nowhere, and thus they end up in the woods.  There's a hilarious scene where, for no reason at all, they get it into their heads that the crooked cop can locate their position by triangulating their cell phone signals.  So Dale bashes his cell phone to death on a rock, and Saul, aiming for a tree, instead launches his cell phone deep into the dark woods.  And when they go looking for it, Saul suddenly thinks they are being chased by a monster, and takes off running, and both he and Dale get injured in the resulting blind stampede through the darkness.  It's a great moment of pot-fueled paranoia, and it's just about the only time in the movie the filmmakers seemed to know what they were doing.

Through several bad moves (due either to poor script writing or the excuse that the main characters are forever stoned) Saul and Dale manage to keep turning up exactly where the drug dealing hitmen predict, and several increasingly boring stand-offs and shoot-outs result, slathered with filthy language and homosexual innuendos.  Some of this stuff is funny, but most of it is obscured by the mismanagement of the violence.  After all, gunshots, no matter how much they are preceded by or suffixed with laughter, are still gunshots, and bullet wounds still bleed, even when Judd Apatow is signing your paycheck.  So we get cracked open heads and bloody noses, and Danny McBride getting shot in the stomach twice - point blank - and still crawling around with blood pouring out of him like the rejected rainbow color from Reservoir Dogs.  And, during a prolonged and violent climax at a grow house in the middle of nowhere, we get machine guns ripping through people, explosions and scorched flesh, crushed corpses, and McBride blowing a guy's foot off with a shotgun after running him over with a car.  This is as violent as the second Halloween movie, for Christ's sake.

Who thought this would be funny?  Who read this script and thought they could get anything funny out of this?  Who read this script and, at this point, still thought this was even a comedy?  There aren't even any one-liners.  At least when Danny Glover shoots Joss Ackland in the head at the end of Lethal Weapon 2, he says something that could be construed as funny.  In this film, all we get is Rogen standing over a charred, horribly disfigured and realistic-looking corpse, and dropping a summons on him and saying, "You have been served."  What is this, a Martin Lawrence movie?  That's not funny.  That's not ironic.  That's just lousy.

Even if it wanted to be an action movie at this point - if it wanted to stop being a comedy and go straight for the hardcore action - it isn't written well enough to do so.  Green, if that's what he was going for, seems not to have even attempted to rewrite the script to clarify the action, let alone to wrestle down the tonal flaws in the material.  Is it satire?  Is it serious comedy?  Is it a spoof?  You have McBride getting shot, burned, beaten, and exploded, and in the next scene, he's at a restaurant eating breakfast - still covered in blood, still bruised and broken and missing hunks of flesh - and no one says anything to him.  The movie didn't begin that way, but somewhere along the line, it got mixed up and turned around (or maybe it got stoned), and all of a sudden it didn't know if it wanted to be funny or exciting or bloody or disgusting, so it ended up being all of these things, though never at the same time.

I have a suggestion for David Gordon Green:  If you're going to do another Judd Apatow project, try your hand at something in the vein of The 40 Year Old Virgin.  You're good at romance, and I'm sure you can make people laugh, so if you can manage to do these things at the same time, we may be in for something.  But don't shoot anybody, because you're not very good at it.