Terrible date movie, as it should be...

Rating: 9/10 (6 August 2008)

I saw Pineapple Express the same day that I saw Step Brothers and The Mummy 3 and it's better than both of those movies combined. It is a genuine stoner movie in every way, there is so much weed in the movie that you might start feeling stoned just watching it, but it soon becomes a strange combination of an action comedy adventure crime movie with a much more developed and brilliant script than you could possibly expect, given what the wardrobe department was coming up with.
It starts out with a black and white scene in an underground bunker back in the late 1940s, I believe, where the government is conducting experiments on the effects of marijuana on the human mind. A lucky volunteer is locked in a room where he smokes weed constantly, periodically helped along by a guy in a foil suit, in case he needs a light. During simple psychological questioning, he doesn't give the answers that the scientists and the government guys in suits want to hear, so they promptly illegalize it.
Jump ahead to today, where we meet our protagonist, a regular guy with a regular job who just wants to get a regular high. Seth Rogen plays Dale Denton, who works as a process server. If you don't know what that is, you're in good shape, because process servers are those people that approach you out of nowhere and say your first and last name to you with a question mark at the end, and when you say yes, they hand you a piece of paper full of bad news and walk away saying "You've been served." Needless to say, it's a pretty thankless job, so he needs to spend most of his time stoned.
James Franco is probably best known from the Spiderman movies (although I did see him in Flyboys a couple years ago and was wildly disappointed), but he inhabits his role in this movie so well and so completely that I sometimes thought it was a bit of a glimpse of Franco's personal life. I hope not, but it's pretty convincing. Remember Eddie Furlong in that staggeringly bad movie Jimmy & Judy? There's a little of that going on here.
One evening while about to deliver one of his notices, Dale Denton (Rogen) witnesses a murder involving a corrupt police officer, so he tosses his joint out the window and speeds away in a panic, only to find himself pursued because the joint was some super high-quality stuff that Saul (Franco) sold him, and so would be easy for the corrupt cop (Rosie Perez) and the criminal kingpin to trace back to him. Soon they find themselves fleeing for their lives in a full scale gang war.
Like all the best stoner movies, Pineapple Express is packed full of hilarious, classic moments, and will surely be quoted for years to come. There tons of over-the-top scenes and situations, some of which may make you a little uncomfortable, but even though they go a little too far sometimes, nothing seems out of place.
There is one scene that really stood out to me, in which three friends are fighting with each other, throwing each other around an apartment and essentially destroying the place and none of them really knows why, and alternately threatening and apologizing to each other.
Strangely, it's a very difficult movie to describe without ruining plot points or failing to do justice to it. The script is truly brilliant, and the performances are so good that it often looks like they just photographed the lives of the characters and put it right up on screen.
It's hard to really describe why a truly hilarious movie is so funny, so let's just say that, aside from the audience drowning out the movie at many points, there was (and this is absolutely a true story) a point when I was watching that everyone was laughing, and then there was this loud noise that turned out to be a kid kicking the chair in front of him in a panic because he was choking on an ice cube. It was actually a little scary, he was doubled over, not breathing, and people were starting to stand up and say oh my god oh my god, but finally he coughed it up. So be careful eating while watching the movie!