It's been almost a year since the screenwriting team of Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg braved the summer-pic sinkhole of August with "Superbad," a deceptively trashy hit comedy about two joined-at-the-hip teens named Seth and Evan coping with the pain of imminent separation.
Watching Rogen and Goldberg's shaggier dog-day offering, "Pineapple Express," one imagines that it's just the sort of picture that their fictional namesakes would have brainstormed if, years after college, they ran into each other by the Beverly Wilshire pool and decided to make a stoner movie.
"Superbad," which traced the obstacle-strewn path of underage guys on the prowl for booze and sex, concealed the soul of a buddy thriller beneath its "American Pie"-ish veneer. The yen for the ultimate cannabis high drives the protagonists of "Pineapple Express," which wears its "Midnight Run" leanings on its facetiously violent, rambunctiously amusing sleeve.
The intoxicants of choice may vary from one picture to the next but the heartfelt impulse remains the same. In the dude-bonding world according to Rogen and Goldberg, there is no love more sacred, or absurd, than the love a guy feels for his male comrades in substance abuse.
In "Pineapple Express," as it happens, the getting of the ultimate joint is never as thorny as the disposing of it. Rogen plays Dale Denton, a process server who eases the tension of serving subpoenas upon unsuspecting victims by being stoned as much as possible. His weed dealer, Saul (James Franco), a hippie-tressed couch potato with a taste for pickles and "Godspell" striped pants, obliges him with a unique, high-test plant from which the film takes its title.
Saul's revered pineapple express is so rare, indeed, that it is easily traceable back to its smoker. This becomes a vexing issue for Dale when he leaves a roach behind at the scene of a crime he has just witnessed, the murder of an Asian crime boss at the hands of a corrupt cop (Rosie Perez) and her drug lord lover (Gary Cole). Finding himself a gangland target, Dale efficiently implicates his high-school-aged girlfriend Angie (Amber Heard), her parents (Ed Begley Jr. and Nora Dunn) and the epically out-of-it Saul.
Despite Dale's seeming devotion to Angie, it is Saul who quickly vaults to the No. 1 spot in his affections, as the two men connect over their shared enthusiasm for pot and mutual fear of being whacked at a tender age by gun-toting thugs. The clincher is a "Butch-and-Sundance"-redolent courting montage, wherein the two amigos leapfrog and cavort in a stoned reverie that culminates in a chaste, 18-hour siesta.
