So Cheech and Chong are going out on tour again for the first time in forever, just as “Pineapple Express” hits theaters. Is some PR firm pulling the strings here?
After you see the exquisitely calibrated stoner jokes in this movie, you might wonder. It’s a mess, but “Pineapple Express” has enough tasty sequences to justify its lapses.
The film’s mildly Hitchcockian premise: A process server (Seth Rogen, the frizzy “Knocked Up” star) and his dope dealer (James Franco, from the “Spider-Man” movies) are accidentally drawn into a criminal vortex when Rogen witnesses a murder and is spotted at the scene of the crime.
What begins as a drowsy comedy ends in actual mayhem. The film doesn’t always blend its different tones of goofball humor and onscreen death, but I’m not sure it wanted to. Director David Gordon Green, the talented maker of such low-key arthouse movies as “All the Real Girls,” emulates the kind of difficult 1970s mood-bender that Robert Altman managed so well.
Rogen, who sounds like a cartoon bear, and Franco, who sounds barely awake, have some of the funniest exchanges heard in movies this year. In their first scene, Rogen just wants to pick up a little recreational weed, but Franco traps him with druggy patter.
Contemplating a uniquely potent cross-shaped joint, Franco muses, “It’s almost a shame to smoke it … it’s like killin’ a unicorn.”
A nonsensical night spent in a forest has a similar dazed and confused quality, and when the duo travel to meet a connection (Danny R. McBride, the star of “The Foot Fist Way”), they take on another layer of zonked glory.
“Pineapple Express” is from Judd Apatow’s production mill, and it was written by Rogen and Evan Goldberg (they wrote “Superbad”) with Apatow’s help. So along with the R-rated humor, expect a great deal of elaborate male bonding (and don’t expect any lectures about the dangers of casual marijuana use).
I think the movie goes on too long, and at times the collision of comedy and head-splitting violence is downright weird. But after the smoke has cleared, you’ll remember the hilarity of Rogen and Franco trying to communicate — a source of humor that Cheech and Chong understood long ago.
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