Title: Pineapple Express
MPAA: R
Runtime: 111 minutes
Director: David Gordon Green

Rating: 0 out of 5 stars

Ok, try this plot on for size: Dale is a stoner. Dale's dealer, Saul, is also a stoner. Dale witnesses a murder. The murderer is the guy two levels above Saul in the Drug Lord Corporate Hierarchy, and he knows Dale saw the crime. There! That should be enough to support a solid two-hour movie, right? I mean, all we have to do here is have the bad drug dudes chase the good drug dudes around for 100+ minutes, and we now have an empty framework in which to stuff as much stupidity as possible. It will be hilarious! Especially if we cast Seth Rogan as Dale, cast James Franco as Saul, and let Judd Apatow have a hand in writing the story!

It's a rare thing to walk away from a movie feeling actual, palpable annoyance and anger. But, congratulations, Pineapple Express, you did it. You found a way to turn Seth Rogan into even more of a rash-causing irritant. Stoners are, all by themselves, quite irksome in real life; I had a few stoner friends in the days of yore ("yore" is a specific period of time, less than "e'er" but more than "hence"), and they usually ended up being a nuisance, in the way that only a human being with a non-functioning brain and a strong desire for Twinkies can be.

In addition to Stoners, Seth Rogan is also an aggravating screen presence, all by himself. This is hard to comprehend, I realize, what with his usual wanton spewing forth for 90 minutes of that pinch-throated, hoarse, growl-yelling that he insists on calling "acting", but which usually just ends up sounding like a sore-throated Kermit the Frog after a 48-hour weekend of chain smoking and doing whiskey shots.

Put these two ingredients together - Stoners' antics and Seth Rogan - and you have Pineapple Express, a movie that belongs to that rare class of films known as the Most Likely to Have You Praying for a Reservoir Dogs Ending category.

I fail to see the humor in watching two grown men bungle around on screen, trying to get a caterpillar high by blowing marijuana smoke at it, discussing the possibility of hanging out to look at "crazy stuff" on the Internet, draining their car battery by falling asleep for several hours with the car radio on, attempting to flush a full-size portable phone handset down the toilet, and any number of other similarly retarded pursuits. This is not even to mention the repeated instances of typically stupid Stoner Philosophical Statements uttered by various characters, which I suppose, are supposed to have me in stitches precisely because of their inanity. For example, Seth Rogan would like me understand that there are really two karmic options for future reincarnation: you can either be an evil person, and come back as an anal bead, or you can be a good person, and come back as Jude Law.

HA HA HA! Pardon me while I spasm uncontrollably with laughter and become temporarily incapable of typing! HA HA! Anal bead! Jude Law! Wooooooo-heeeee!

Next point: car-chase scenes, even if they do include a lot of things getting smashed up, and even if they do feature several sustained minutes of James Franco and Seth Rogan delivering their best panicked, frightened screams ("DO SOMETHING!", "AHHHHHHHHHHH!", "LOOK OUT!", etc., ad nauseam), are not automatically funny. I promise. It may not even be entertaining at all, especially if it involves the aforementioned this-is-supposed-to-be-funny-because-we're-so-panicky screaming sequence. (Have we learned nothing from the Macaulay Culkin Movie Blight of 1990 and 1992?)

But a movie such as this cannot survive on inane humor and faux-danger alone, right? So the writers decided to also include the element of Human Relationships: we get to see Dale and Saul go through something of a lover's spat, which (we hope!) will be reconciled before the movie ends. Except ... it's asking a lot to want the audience to even care. Saul is a drug dealer, Dale is a stoner, and they've known each other for all of two months. The writers could have done the utterly unthinkable and unconventional, actually killed off these two main characters, and I would have raved about their creative genius in keeping the audience on their toes. I also would have saluted the decision to have any Seth Rogan character die on screen.

Yes, it's a rare thing to actually be irked by the time a movie ends, but just as one grows irritable when a stoner friend comes over and refuses to leave for two hours, while eating all of the carb-based food in your pantry, so also does one find oneself wishing that this movie would just, please, please, go away and bother somebody else until it's sober again.

If you like "humor" so devoid of intelligence it crosses below "potty humor" and into the Void, if you like movies that feature sled-loads of F-bombs (yes, sadly, even uttered by young kids), if you are, in short, a stoner yourself, then I have the perfect movie for you ... The Wizard of Oz (you'll have to supply your own F-bombs). Don't ever see this movie.