Pineapple Express

2.5/4 stars

By some strange coincidence, I saw two movies this weekend that involve older men dating 17 year old girls. One was Pineapple Express, the other Woody Allen's 1979 film Manhattan. You could hardly be blamed for not wanting to consider the similarities between these two films, but they do share a certain honest quality in their dialogue and their treatment of relationships. This is the primary draw of Pineapple Express. Seth Rogen is quickly becoming one of my favorite comedic performers, and I suspect I'm not alone in this. As a writer, he's certainly very good at coming up with one liners for himself and crafting hilarious exchanges, both improvised and on paper. However, like the other prominent film that has Rogen in a writing credit, Superbad, Pineapple Express suffers from a rather nearsighted construction. While these movies get a lot of mileage out of joking around between their leads, they fall short whenever they try to be movies. The bigger setpieces, such as a car chase and a massive shootout are unsatisfying, and the arc of the film itself is meandering and lacks closure. You will laugh a lot in this movie, but unlike superior Apatow produced efforts like Knocked Up or Forgetting Sarah Marshall, you won't leave the theater satisfied that you saw something entirely worthwhile. There's something very cheap about the ending of Pineapple Express, the way various elements are left unresolved (like the aforementioned girlfriend), and the random, credibility straining manner in which others are resolved. Maybe other viewers will be less bothered by this than me, but you get the impression that it was thought that every important part of the movie could be improvised, and through some magic, the end result would be okay. I prefer a movie that knows where it's going, what it's doing, and can provide a why for the things that it shows us.

Written August 16, 2008.