A basic comedy with little for the casual viewer

Rating: Null/10 (9 November 2008)

Dale is a simple man who is dating a high school senior and enjoying his job serving court summons and spending the rest of his time getting stoned on that good weed that dealer Saul keeps him supplied with. After one more visit to Saul, Dale leaves with a couple of joints of brand new Pineapples Express and carries on to his next job. Coincidentally his next job is at the house of Ted Jones  the main drug dealer in the area  and he arrives just in time to witness Ted and a female police officer killing somebody. Dale chucks his joint and flees the scene but the distinctive aroma of Pineapple Express is unmistakable to Ted and it means the witness was a customer of Saul's. Realising this, Dale and Saul go on the run but Ted's men and corrupt cops are hot on their heels.
It has been many years since I last smoked but I do know that it is not a great feat to make a stoner laugh and, as such, Pineapple Express is hardly going after a tough target audience. Much like all goofy comedies, this plays well to people who are high (I think I have watched the South Park movie and Spaced loads of time in that condition) but in a more sober state of mind it is not actually that remarkable. Marketed as an action/comedy, the film plays a lot more like the many Rogan/Appatow films that have come out over the last few years (in a rush before the taste for them wares off?) and it isn't as smart or as funny as it would like to think it is. It does manage to create a tangible air of a stoner comedy but the writers seem to have forgotten the substance, because it does all feel very basic  like most of it was the first thing they had thought of.
It has a few laughs here and there but way too few to make the comedy work. Meanwhile, as an action film, it relies too heavily on the comedic tone to carry it and it is not that "exciting" or engaging. Indeed, with the comedy not really working, the body count and graphic violence are quite excessive and unpleasant because, in order to work, the audience either needed to be enjoying it as a silly affair (like Shoot 'Em Up) or as engaging action. I never really have either of these and, while it was reasonably amusing, it was never more than that. Rogen and Franco make likable enough stoners but there is not enough here to make them really engaging characters more than simple stoners. The support cast feature plenty of solid turns with Cole, Perez, Corrigan, Robinson, McBride and a few others doing good work with their material.
Pineapple Express is aimed at stoners and this is pretty much the only audience that will find it a lot of fun. To the casual viewer, the humour and stoner air is the whole story as there is not a lot else to the film  not comedy, nor action. What there is is basic and lacking in imagination and invention. Ignore the hype  this is just a very basic comedy that needed a lot more criticism while it was being made and a lot less freedom to the makers.