Unrated Cut

Rating: 8/10 (23 April 2009)

David Gordon Green, a balladist of the cinema, is the last person you'd count on to direct a Judd Apatow male-buddy comedy about two potheads who farcically spark a drug war. But he makes such an above-average stoner comedy, there's a hazard he'll be reduced to vogue in mainstream Hollywood and lured away from the high-brow human interest of All the Real Girls and Snow Angels.
This definite turn by the Terence Malick-inspired filmmaker, from the same writing collaboration as Superbad, with a sizzling hot Rosie Perez in a cop suit and a die-laughing cameo by Ed Begley, Jr., has all the components you'd assume from the school in which it swims: male bonding, sophomoric though reasonably relatable sexual desires, rhetorical ribaldry, staggering drug abuse, fight scenes, gunfire, explosions. Yawn? Not this time. It's a splendid movie, first-rate of its iffy genre. In effect, it's a stoner comedy that is actually hilarious and very clever.
The heroes are a process server, Seth Rogen, and his drug dealer, James Franco. Both are stoned in every single scene. Rogen has a romance going with a high school girl. I think he is still at the age of temperamental maturity where going all the way means asking a girl to be his girlfriend. Franco is even more useless, hiding in his apartment permeated with electronic gizmos and pop culture wares.
Most buddy films aren't that radically distinct from romantic comedies. The relationships are generally progressed in a similar demeanor, simply with male bonding substituting erotic rapport. I think that particularly characterizes the buddies in most buddy movies produced by Judd Apatow. Consider this film's satirically mandatory ending, there's just as much hugging and reciting, "I love you, man!" as there is high-fiving.
A third chief character arrives on the stage when Dale and Saul pop in to see Saul's buddy Red played by Danny R. McBride, who has by now dimed them to an odd couple of hit men, played by the underused Kevin Corrigan and the hilarious Craig Ferguson. All of this steers, don't ask how, to a full-scale gunfight between Ted's men and a rival drug empire, only ever referred to by anybody as "The Asians."
Two unlikely troupes have convened: the Apatow production gang, and Green and his recurrent sight-and-sound team as well as actor Danny McBride. Not shrugging off creative responsibilities on account of working within the same genre as Cheech and Chong, Harold and Kumar and Half-Baked, Green for the most part uses wide-screen set-ups with becoming aesthetic savvy. The smartly toned movie even surpasses the conventional contemporary action- comedy chase, this time involving two squad cars.
This fifth feature for Green is the resolution to the question, "What would happen if probable garbage material was made by a good director?" The result is not only a funny action- comedy, but one that is even funnier if you are or ever have been high smoking pot. The conversations, paranoia, lack of motivation, indulgence in pop culture including its obscurities, the characters' sense of humor, the ending. The film could be argued as either in support or opposition of marijuana. The answer is in the characterizations. I think if you are or have been high on it, you come out both in the mood for it and feeling guilty for being in the mood for it.