Movie review: ‘Pineapple Express’ goes up in smoke
Posted by Dennis Sellers 
Aug 8, 2008 at 6:45am
By Matt Martin
The Pineapple Express is a Cheech and Chong movie mixed with Quentin Tarantino violence. And it’s not a comfortable marriage. It’s the latest entry from the Judd Apatow factory (the folks behind Knocked Up, Superbad, Forgetting Sarah Marshall) and it has several laughs and a layer of sweetness underneath the vulgarity, profanity and bleak violence.
Directed by David Gorden Green from a screenplay by Seth Rogen, Evan Goldberg and Apatow, The Pineapple Express is a celebration of friendship—and pot. It’s the story of lazy stoner Dale Denton (Rogen) and his lazy dealer Saul Silver (James Franco, who, unexpectedly steals the film with his Jeff Spicoli riffings) who come into a potent strain of weed called Pineapple Express. Then Dale becomes the only witness to a murder by a crooked cop (Rosie Perez) and the city’s most dangerous drug lord (Gary Cole), he panics and dumps his roach of Pineapple Express at the scene. However, the weed is so rare that it can be traced back to him. Soon the the doobie brothers are on the run for their lives from an assortment of thugs (including Danny McBride, Kevin Corrigan and Craig Robinson).
The Pineapple Express has lots of funny one-liners and some amusing scenes (a goofy car chase, (a black-and-white prelude set in a 1937 military pot-testing lab). However, it assumes that all scenes of folks getting high are hilarious. They’re not. And the bloody finale seems to belong to another movie entirely. Imagine Harold and Kumar suddenly turning into Dirty Harry.
Pineapple Express is rated R for pervasive language, drug use, sexual references and violence. Running time: 111 minutes. Macsimum rating: 5 out of 10. You can check out the film’s trailer on the QuickTime movie trailer site.
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Dennis Sellers
Dennis has been a newspaper editor/reporter (seven years) and teacher (seven years). He has over 4,000 magazine, newspaper and online articles to his credit. He has also covered the Mac and tech industries for over a decade for such online publications as MacCentral, MacMinute and now MacsimumNews.
