If Judd Apatow and Seth Rogan keep turning out junk like this...their 15 minutes of fame are up.

Rating: 1/10 (6 August 2008)

I'm a big fan of most of Judd Apatow's efforts, and own a few of the earlier films directed by David Gordon Green. I think James Franco and Seth Rogen have proved themselves to be funny and decent actors in the past. So I went to the mid-day premiere of Pineapple Express today excited and full of enthusiasm.
To put it bluntly, this film is a mess. It tries, ever so hard, to merge a parody of action drug heist/corrupt cop/feuding drug lords films with a stoner comedy. And sad to say...NONE OF IT WORKS. You could have heard a pin drop in the theater I saw the film in. No one was laughing. The only sounds you heard were people moaning and sighing in exasperation at some of the endlessly stupid set pieces of the film.
Rosie Perez, Gary Cole, Ed Begley, Jr. and Nora Dunn all look like they'd rather be somewhere else.
The direction, cinematography, editing look like it were shot on a cell phone and edited on a laptop.
The "buddy/buddy" BFFF (Best F------ Friends Forever) dialogue is cringe inducing. Danny McBride is someone I think I can safely say I never want to see acting in another film. His character made my skin crawl.
I think you could compare this film to last year's HOT FUZZ. That film also was a mix-up of humor/action/character comedy. But it WORKED. It was riotously over-the-top, and full of great characters. This one has none of the laughs that that film had, and not a single character that you even cared about.
I bet I checked my watch over twenty times. Pineapple Express seemed four hours long.
Did I laugh..even once? Um..yeah...once, at a dumb hitchhiking gag by Franco.
You've been warned! Mike Myers must be breathing a sigh of relief...because this one is even worse than his Love Guru bomb.