Gary Cole, one of the most underrated comic actors working today, has almost nothing to do as the ruthless drug lord, and Rosie Perez is all sass and no substance. He does, however, manage to stumble through a crisis of guilty conscience and McBride makes his foggy moral journey quite an experience.
And it doesn’t help that Saul’s connection, Red (Danny McBride), is willing to sell out Saul to save his own skin. Their response to any stress or threat is to toke up, which leaves them easily distracted and seriously paranoid, a serious impediment when fleeing men with guns.
It’s the “wrong man” formula, the innocent plunged into the middle of seriously bad people who hurt and kill inconvenient witnesses, except these innocents are almost perpetually stoned. They’re not exactly angels – Dale has a high school girlfriend (who is, in all likelihood, more mature than he is, but still it’s a little discomforting and a lot inappropriate) and Saul gets a group of school kids stoned – but they are sincere and admirably loyal and don’t deserve the shitstorm that comes their way when Dale inadvertently becomes witness to a cop killing and leaves a calling card at the scene of his sloppy escape (note to self: don’t drive a getaway car when baked to the gills). James Franco flashes his wide grin of innocence and benign amiability as the sweet, stupid, emotionally ebullient Saul, the friendly neighborhood dope dealer and the exclusive distributor of the sweet new herbal strain known as Pineapple Express. Seth Rogen is wise-cracking straight man Dale, a process server who is remarkably effective despite the fact that he tokes up between assignments. The screenplay by Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg (from a story co-written with producer Judd Apatow) doesn’t really take us anywhere we haven’t been before, but it gets stoner culture in a way movies haven’t really done before, and it offers an accidental buddy film that works. Not previously a director known for his sense of humor, he has a great time with the comedy while keeping his eye on the characters and the chemistry. The sensibility of David Gordon Green, who jumped from indie dramas of small town tragedy to this stoner buddy comedy, is one of the reasons that Pineapple Express (2008) works. One of the smartest things he did was to seek out directors not normally associated with his brand of humor and bring them on board. The Judd Apatow factory refreshed the coming-of-age comedy (for all ages of adolescent men) in comedies like Knocked Up, Superbad, and Forgetting Sarah Marshall before stretching itself thin (that’s my best explanation for Drillbit Taylor and Step Brothers).
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