I Wanted So Much to Enjoy This Movie...

Rating: 4/10 (9 August 2008)

Maybe I screwed up by going into "Pineapple Express" with such high expectations. I mean, last week I saw "Step Brothers". The trailer was funny enough, but I didn't know if the one-note joke of seeing Will Farrell and John C. Reilly stuck in "failure to launch" mode would hold up for a whole movie. Still I wanted to see it, so I went in with low expectations. I laughed out loud through parts of the movie but never really felt fully entertained. By the end of the movie the few moments I had laughed at weren't nearly enough to make the film feel like a satisfying comedic whole. I was disappointed, but not too worried because I knew "Pineapple Express" was only a few days away. Surely it would be the laugh-out-loud comedy of the year. I was mistaken.
I've seen a ton of movies this year and few have really stood out. "Indiana Jones" was okay, "Hancock" was a pleasant surprise, and "Iron-Man" was ten times better than it had any right to be thanks to Robert Downey Jr.'s performance. "The Dark Knight" was hands down the best movie so far this year, surpassing even my highest expectations. But what has been missing this year is a standout comedy. I thoroughly enjoyed "Juno", but it was light and sweet. Where is this year's "Superbad" (absolutely one of my favorite comedies of the past 10 years)? "Forgetting Sarah Marshall" is probably way funnier than I thought it was, but I had been through a break-up the day I saw it and went into it looking for relief. I chuckled, but was never able to really get into it.
So today I went into "Pineapple Express" ready to be entertained. Unfortunately the movie fell flat on almost every level. I knew something was amiss when I checked my watch thinking an hour or so had passed, only to find out that the movie had only been running for 35 minutes. Surely the pace will pick up, I thought, but the movie just droned on until the end credits. Nothing overly hilarious or exciting happens in the movie. There are jokes and a few funny bits, but sadly I laughed more during the first 20 minutes of "Step Brothers" than I did during the entire runtime of "Pineapple Express". There are explosions and a car chase, but they offer about as much punch and tension as you might get watching a group of 5 year olds in a cap-gun fight. Probably even less.
It's hard to say exactly where the movie went wrong. At times I thought maybe it was the slow pace, but there was much more going wrong than bad editing. Gary Cole and Rosie Perez were beyond uninteresting or even threatening as the film's villains. They seem much more interested in drinking beer and eating fried chicken than catching the film's protagonists. At no point do you ever feel that Seth Rogen (great as always, but even he couldn't save this picture) and James Franco are truly in any real danger. Franco's performance is a real treat, but after 15 minutes you wish it was being utilized in a better movie. His chemistry with Rogen is electric, but this simply isn't the buddy film it could have been. And then there is the carnage. That's right. One character is beaten to a bloody pulp and even shot twice (maybe even more times before the movie ends) but somehow manages to live through to the end of the movie. This could have been hilarious, but it loses it's humor entirely when death and injury seem so real throughout the rest of the movie. Imagine seeing a battered, bruised and bandaged Wiley Coyote walking amongst the corpses of the D-Day invasion scene from "Saving Private Ryan" and you get an idea of what I mean. Seeing the all too realistically damaged dead bodies of a man smashed by a car and another killed by an explosion are shocking and completely unnerving since this movie is supposed to be funny. Dead bodies can be funny (look at "Weekend at Bernie's" or even the morbidly humorous morgue van scene in "Bad Boy's II"), but not when they look like the sort of thing you would see at rotten.com.
To some degree I think "Superbad" has ruined the comedy genre for me. I knew going into it that it was going to be funny, but nothing could have prepared me for just how outrageously funny it ended up being. I honestly don't think there is a false note in that movie. Then you have "Pineapple Express". This should have been a great comedy, but even the greatest musicians can't make beautiful music with instruments that are atrociously out of tune. So what was my favorite part of the movie? Probably the last 30 minutes. Why? Certainly not because of what was going on on screen. The girl I went with (ironically the same girl I went through a break-up with the day I saw "Forgetting Sarah Marshall") snuck in a gigantic bag of Reese's Pieces. Apparently just as bored and let down by the movie as I was she tossed one of them at me to amuse herself. I tossed a couple back, and before you knew it we were having a full blown Reese's Pieces battle right there in the middle of the cinema. And the fact that no one in the audience told us to settle down or shut up tells you just how into the movie they were.
"Pineapple Express" was a disappointment and an easily forgettable movie, but the experience of going to see it will always be a fond one thanks to a gigantic bag of Reese's Pieces.