Watching Pineapple Express is like sitting dead sober in a room with a bunch of stoned people who are laughing uproariously. They're having a great time. You're not.
East Bay Express
August 15, 2011
This is possibly the first time a blackened, burnt corpse is played for laughs. It all flows by like so much sugar water.
At its sharpest, the script by [Seth]Rogen and Evan Goldberg, who co-wrote Superbad, recalls what made Superbad worth seeing: the sidewinding conversational riffs, the why-am-I-laughing? wordplay.
This is an endearingly slovenly, profane movie with bursts of startling violence, but it's all played for nyuk-nyuk laughs, and it has been directed with more care than it might initially appear by David Gordon Green.
The movie runs red with both blood and cherry Slushies ... There's also more male affection on display here than, well, since 'Superbad' and that cowboy movie that people still complain to me about.
Your love of it will largely depend on how funny you find a movie with 85 percent of the jokes based on smoking weed. For the rest of you a lot of it is going to feel very silly, crammed with potty humor and overly long for such a simple subject matter.
But there's still time for a gloriously unexpected coda, a moment of quiet reflection and narrative ingenuity that confirms 'Pineapple Express' as the finest comedy of the year.
