On Screen

The Judd Apatow train keeps on a-rollin’, with a different film
involving chunky guys in their underpants emerging almost every week.
As gratifying as it is to see John C. Reilly get steady work, however,
it’s becoming increasingly apparent that the improv tangents that once
stood out from the pack now look more like self-indulgent tics of the
sort best relegated to DVD outtakes.

The hotly anticipated Pineapple Express continues the Team
Apatow streak, to both positive and negative effect. Divvied up into
YouTube lengths, it’d be awesome. Seen as a whole, it comes worryingly
close to the feature-length equivalent of Burt Reynolds slapping Dom
DeLuise during the end credits to The Cannonball Run.

Aping the feel of ’80s action-comedies—dig the ending Huey
Lewis song—Seth Rogen and Even Goldberg’s script follows an
amiable process server (Rogen) and his pot dealer (James Franco), who
are on the bleary-eyed run after witnessing a murder. Director David
Gordon Green (George Washington) captures the appropriate air of
bong ennui, but proves far less capable of accommodating the shifts to
action. When Rosie Perez delivers one of the more understated
performances in the film, something’s tonally amiss.

So is it being assholish to wish for more discipline in a pot
comedy? Entirely possible. Still and all, it’s tough not to feel at
least slightly ambivalent about a movie that cares more about amusing
itself than the audience. Case in point: About 20 minutes in, frequent
Green cohort Danny McBride shows up to deliver a devastatingly funny
cameo, the sort of comedic A-bomb that had me dazedly scribbling
comparisons to the sainted Alec Baldwin in Glengarry Glen Ross.
And then the filmmakers keep bringing him back, again and again, to
increasingly diminished effect. How can we miss you if you don’t go
away?