By Greg Oguss
It’s official. Judd Apatow has jumped the shark. Apatow and his gang peaked with the release of Superbad and Knocked Up last summer. Since then, Apatow’s production company has been releasing films on a pace to rival John Woo or Jackie Chan during the Hong Kong New Wave before the 1997 handover to Communist China turned those guys into expatriate Hollywood icons whose best years are behind them. In December of 2007 came Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, a disappointing tribute to the excesses of the Hollywood bio-pic rather than a sharp-edged satire of the rock and roll lifestyle. As I noted in my review for Snark, this spring’s Forgetting Sarah Marshall got by on the everyman appeal of Jason Segel and some quality dick jokes. But by then, as the editor of an online mag pointed out after reading a piece I wrote on Apatow’s films, Apatow seemed “stuck in the comedy cul-de-sac.” Even the most talented comedians have to confront this. But the speed with which Apatow and his crew have been churning out films has only accelerated the process.
Now we have the embarrassment that is Pineapple Express. Directed by art-house veteran David Gordon Green, Pineapple Express was scripted by the Superbad’s Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, with Apatow receiving a co-story credit. However, the story is simply an amalgamation of Tarantino flix and Apatow themes. Rogen and James Franco star as Dale and Saul, a pair of stoners who bond and “learn stuff” while on the run from a gangster named Ted Jones (Gary Cole) after Dale witnesses a female cop rub out one of Ted’s rivals as he’s sitting in a car outside Jones’s mansion inhaling a joint stuffed with the “pineapple express” of the film’s title. The chase film that follows has some funny lines, most of them uttered by Franco’s pot dealer Saul, such as when he dazzles Dale with the “crossbow joint,” a high-tech marvel of marijuana-engineering invented by Saul’s “second favorite civil engineer,” who also designed the Golden Gate Bridge. But the weed-centric humor quickly wears thin. The film’s idea of comedy is best expressed by Saul’s repeated references to Rosie Perez’s corrupt police-woman as a “lady cop,” correcting Dale whenever he tells the story of the murder and mentions a “female cop” as the assassin.
David Gordon Green is out of his element with dialogue-based comedy, and the pacing is off in many scenes. But script problems are to blame for the film’s flaws. It’s not easy to balance crime film-style violence with screwball comedy like Tarantino did in True Romance, Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction. Robert Rodriguez and Tarantino have brilliantly explored the comedic consequences of random violence, most memorably in Pulp Fiction when John Travolta’s Vincent Vega ends the life of a lackey named Marvin because his partner Jules drives over a bump at the wrong time and Vega’s weapon accidentally discharges. In Pineapple Express, Dale gets his ear partially shot off, a heavy gets his face scarred by a pot of coffee, and Saul puts his foot through a windshield. But the intended physical comedy never rises above Laurel and Hardy, and it’s an uneasy mix with the happy-go-lucky world of Dale and Saul’s everyday lives.
The acting by the minor players is surprisingly bad, with Cole and Perez’s ham-handed efforts seemingly straight out of a blaxploitation flick. Yet there doesn’t seem to be any intentional “camp” quality to their shrill grating performances. There are also a few plot-holes you could drive a Mack Truck through. Dale is given an 18 year-old girlfriend named Angela, which allows for the film’s funniest scene when he visits her at high school and the script enters Superbad territory. The movie sparks to life as Angie banters with a jock Dale dubs “Sporty Spice.” But the script has no idea what to do with Angie. The last we see of her, she’s waiting in a hotel room where Dale has stashed her and her family for protection, promising to call when it’s safe. Equally eyebrow-raising is the film’s lack of an ending. After Dale, Saul and a minor character named Red escape from Jones and his henchman, they gather at a diner to marvel at the “miracle” of how they’ve bonded and all the “stuff” they’ve learned. This unfunny self-reflexive dialogue time-out recalls the worst moments in Kevin Smith’s films, another talented filmmaker who quickly lost his mojo. But coming in the final scene, it is fairly astonishing. The scene ends with Saul’s aged grandmother arriving to pick the trio up, another plot turn without rhyme or reason.
The final scene recalls a joke that Dale tells early in the film about the virtues of weed, that it makes “everything better,” including sex and shitty movies. This joke was also in Walk Hard and is another example how lazy the Apatow gang is getting. It’s a set-up for a reviewer to take a shot at the film along the lines of, “Well, then they should give away bags of Pineapple Express with every ticket ‘cause that’s the only way people will be satisfied with this turkey.” The film has already disappointed people expecting big things from the Superbad duo. Following a crappy opening weekend showing, Rogen and Franco announced the film was “not a stoner flick” to assure everyone it’s not just a bunch of scenes of dudes getting high and acting silly. It pretty much is. But that doesn’t mean it can’t be funny as anyone who’s seen Sean Penn as Jeff Spiccoli in Fast Times at Ridgemont High can tell you. Superbad was the Fast Times of its generation. It’s difficult to follow up a film like that. Cameron Crowe followed up Fast Times with the highly forgettable The Wild Life. But Crowe went on to have a pretty good run. So it’s probably premature to count out Apatow, Rogen and Evan Goldberg, too.
