If you dislike today's film comedies, with their non-stop swearing and vulgar jokes, blame Judd Apatow. He churns out roughly one a year. The trouble is, dreadfully juvenile though they may be, these films can make you laugh, especially if you watch them in a movie theatre. Added to this, they tend to be underpinned by a moral sense. For example, Apatow's 2007 hit Knocked Up quietly promoted a pro-life argument. This put noses out of joint among the pro-choice lobby.
The new film, Pineapple Express, a buddy-buddy chase caper, contains slapstick, some funny jokes and a winsome hero in Seth Rogen (who co-wrote the screenplay). This time Apatow has tweaked his formula by spattering it with violence of the Pulp Fiction variety. It's supposed to be cartoonish but it jars. Apatow, who produces, has chosen David Gordon Green as director, who made arty stuff like Snow Angels and George Washington. There's nothing arty about Pineapple Express, though.
Rogen plays Dale Denton, a chubby, laid-back process server - that is, he serves people with subpoenas. Dale cruises suburban Los Angeles in an old Cadillac listening to talk radio and smoking endless marijuana "doobies". Unbelievably, he has an attractive blonde girlfriend, although the film focuses rather on his relationship with his marijuana dealer. Dale is the same happy loser character that Rogen plays in other Apatow films.
One evening he is waiting to serve a client with legal papers when he witnesses a gruesome murder. In his panic to escape he discards the remainder of his joint at the scene, a joint made from a new and exclusive strain of pot known as "pineapple express". The gangster murderer (a boring Gary Cole) and his bent policewoman partner (Rosie Perez, likewise) are able to trace the rare pot back to Seth's dealer, Saul (James Franco), a floppy-haired slacker in pyjama bottoms. Despite his being befuddled by pot, Dale works out that his and Saul's lives are in danger: the two of them make a run for it. Both spend a good part of the movie sucking on joints, coughing, rambling in a stoned, giggly and inconsequential way and clowning around. Their chat sometimes raises a smile but you have to be in the mood.
Along the way they pick up a mid-level dealer, Red, amusingly rendered by James McBride. There's a big fight scene in which McBride's head is smashed through a wall. McBride throws an ashtray at Rogen's head. Franco hits a henchman in the face with a pot of coffee, scalding him. A baddie shoots off part of Rogen's ear. Car chases. Loud explosions. You get the idea. After an hour, I started to look at my watch.
Pineapple Express has some undeniably funny moments. Rogen employs excellent timing, which carries him a long way. When I watched the film, the audience roared at goofy lines like "couscous - the food so nice they named it twice". In another scene Rogen deliciously abuses his girlfriend's weird twit of a schoolteacher. But there is something heartless about the violence, and the plot could have been scribbled on the back of an envelope. There's also confusion in the attitude to drugs. On the one hand, cannabis in the first half is seen as harmless and hilarious. We are expected to smile indulgently or even to cheer "way to go!" at Dale driving a car while smoking his weed to the pumping sound of "Electric Avenue" - whereas it's hard to imagine the same attitude these days to a driver drinking alcohol. The film is careful to distinguish between cannabis and "hard" drugs when a customer mistakenly asks Saul the dealer for Percocet (a strong painkiller). Saul is mortified and primly tells the man he's "come to the wrong place". On the other hand, one senses that the filmmakers consider too much enthusiasm for cannabis to be the "wrong" line to take and so they clumsily shoehorn a patronising moral lesson into the story. As a result of their lives having been in danger, supposedly, our heroes come to see that drugs lead to no good, mess up their lives etc. Dale spells it out in a lecture to Saul. It is contrived, formulaic and cynical.
The makers attempt to examine seriously the nature of the friendship of Dale and Saul: Dale starts off seeing Saul as merely a drug supplier and by the end they are true friends. Some homoerotic hints are dropped about the male bonding of buddy pictures, as when Dale and Saul spend a romantic night in the woods together.
The movie winds up with a shoot-out at the gangsters' drug warehouse which fails to thrill and is set to old-fashioned synthesiser music - it reminded me of 1980s action flicks. The ending is unoriginal, looks cheap and tosses in yet more tasteless violence. Pineapple Express lacks the warm heart that redeemed previous Apatow efforts, being essentially calculating. It expects little of its audience - and will do good business at the box office. |
