Pineapple Express

Why the hell is David Gordon Green directing a Judd Apatow movie? More importantly, what the hell does he do with it? Green's oeuvre consists mostly of tense, gritty indie films set in working class towns, where dysfunctional relationships provide for meditations on modernity and masculinity. Pineapple Express is a Seth Rogen vehicle named for a particularly potent strain of weed. What next, Happy Madison hiring Todd Solondz for the next Deuce Bigalow sequel?

Green has said that he admires Apatow's independence as a producer and that he wanted to indulge his "trashy side." The movie, though, ends up as something more complicated: Disparate elements of Apatow, Rogen and Green smash into each other, creating a jarring sense of cognitive dissonance. The trailer's promise of a stoner romp belies a dark, violent film that jumps from wacky comedy to cynical satire from moment to moment, as if to purposefully discombobulate the viewer.

Rogen, along with his screenwriting partner Evan Goldberg, wrote the script for Pineapple Express, which they developed at Apatow's suggestion. Though Rogen's screen persona is as soft and fuzzy as his munchies gut, their writing has a sharper edge. Rogen and Goldberg wrote several Bruno sketches for Da Ali G Show, including one where the gay Austrian journalist spends some time in "the gayest place in America," Alabama, and Bruno cheerleads for the Crimson Tide. Their script for Superbad takes the teen comedy to previously untold level of scatology, as if they were trying to scare the hell out of parents by telling them, in graphically biological terms, what their children are learning from the Internet. Even their Drillbit Taylor has awkward moments detailing teenage emasculation anxiety.

Rogen and Goldberg do something similar in their conception of Pineapple Express. Like Superbad, the idea is to dirty up a silly genre by putting improv dialogue in the mouths are characters who are less polished than normal movie characters, and thus getting them closer to the audience ("They're like my friends, but funnier!"). Superbad used this method to put the shocking perversion of the Internet Age on full display. Here, Rogen and Goldberg imagine the same kind of beat-beyond-real characters, this time drug users and drug dealers, in the plot of a crime movie, rather than the slick cinematic versions who effortlessly fire Russian firearms at speeding Lexuses. In essence, they conjured up an oxymoron: the "weed action movie."

David Gordon Green seems to have used this template as some sort of experiment. The result is, by a great measure, the most violent Apatow film to date. Green says that most of the action scenes were developed after the script was set; the result of which is that Green significantly darkens Rogen and Goldberg's original idea for the weed action movie. The film becomes a kind of multilevel satire in which the lead characters of a typical Apatow stoner comedy are pathetic without being especially likable (like most real people caught in various ends of the drug trade), then imposed on the template of a Hong Kong-style crime thriller.

On one level, Pineapple Express confronts the audience with exactly how un-movie-like weed culture is. In the usual Apatow movie, weed bonds the pack together, but here, the paranoia and isolation of marijuana use makes it impossible to have close relationships. On another, the movie parodies the Hong Kong glorification of crime. The result is a disconcerting mess that's often funny if only for the sheer contempt Green has for the audience: He finds the audience guilty not only of being stupid enough to believe stoner films, but also as an an accomplice to the ridiculous fiction of drug crime films. Green's method is like a stone-cold killer in a John Woo movie: He makes us laugh, then immediately shoots us in the face.

Witness a scene toward the beginning of the second act, where Dale (Rogen) and his dealer Saul (James Franco) go to the house of Saul's middleman Red (Danny McBride) to try to figure out if the syndicate boss (Gary Cole) knows Rogen witnessed a murder. A bumbling fight ensues, with these clumsy dudes throwing each other into china cabinets in a scene that closer resembles a backyard version of a WWE Hardcore Title Belt match than the stylized martial arts of, say, old school Chow Yun Fat. They tie Red up, and escape out the back when the syndicate's cronies come in. In the movies, the strong men usually wear suits and kill with lethal efficiency. These guys, however, are sloppy, fat, unshaven losers with families, who kill because it's the only job they can hold down. This being an Apatow movie, Red tries to motormouth his way out, inviting the guys over for fish tacos — but then, bam!, they shoot him in the stomach.

The audience laughs because, hey, fish tacos are funny. But then the bubble bursts because of the shock of the gunshot. This is not what happens in a stoner comedy, where pot is only dangerous if the police catch you with it, and neither is it what happens in a shoot 'em up, because there has to be some highly choreographed death scene. But Green just hits us with it, as if he's trying to shoot the audience in the stomach. The camera lingers on the reactions, the blood oozes — the laughter dies. Green gives us a cinematic guilt trip.

Much of the rest of the movie operates the same way. He lets the boys improv lines ("It's almost a shame to smoke it. It's like killing a unicorn,"), but as the movie winds on, he continually jars us with violence and death. During one extended sequence, Franco drives a car with his foot in the windshield, which is quite hilarious. Then the car bounces through a grocery store parking lot, and a cop tries to shoot him. The audience has been laughing at this for about five minutes — but then, smash cut to a stray bullet striking a boy holding a grocery bag next to his father. Green has us rolling with the wacky hijinks car chase, but then he throws a real-looking gunshot wound into the picture — an innocent kid, no less — complete with a darkened bullet hole, a body convulsion and airborne produce flying from the grocery sack.

Green's experiment even extends to his conception of the characters. The standard Apatow stoners are innocent man-boy schlubs who just need to grow up a bit, usually with the help of lovely, sensitive women who sees through the juvenile lifestyle to the husband material within. Here, Rogen's Dale is more than a case of arrested development; he should actually be arrested. Dale dates a high school girl (Amber Heard), showing up at her locker to make out between classes. When he's not prowling for jail-bait, he's a process server who smokes weed and hands out subpoenas all day. Dale doesn't have the slacker erudition that Knocked Up's Ben Stone does; he's simply pathetic.

This is where we see that Rogen the writer has more range than Rogen the actor. Had Rogen played Dale with more self-loathing, Green's ploy might have worked. Instead, Rogen gives little sense of the shame that Dale must feel. He's not without shame when, for instance, he's directly confronted by a high school jock who sweets on his girl, but in his solo scenes or conversations with Heard, you don't get the sense that his soul has become, essentially, the bong residue of a life headed nowhere. He's mostly just concerned about her screwing other guys next year at college, not the fact that he's a 25-year-old dude becoming the Chicago equivalent of this guy without the muscles and tight T-shirt. There's no reason to like Dale, which seems to be Green's point — you strip the Apatow dialogue away from an Apatow hero, and you're left with some loser in a beat-up car whose interior looks like the Beijing skyline. Rogen doens't convey Dale's inner sadness.

James Franco does better as the spaced-out Saul, who smokes, deals and watches sitcom reruns all day. Saul gets the best one-liners ("heat-seeking missiles, bloodhounds, foxes, barracudas"), but Franco's blank stare shows us an undercurrent of loneliness to his existence. Again, in most Apatow movies, weed bonds the pack together, but in Pineapple Express, it prevents people from bonding — which is often truer to real life. Nobody in this movie has any real friends; they can't communicate with each other except through hazy observations about … stuff. The film's biggest success is when it becomes an ironic bro-mance, with Franco at the heart.

Still, even in the faux-sentimental ending, Green jerks with the tone so much that who feel like he's trying to punish you for crimes against cinema. His direction is reminiscent of the contemptuous Ridley Scott, in which the auteur actively hates the audience for watching his movie. Perhaps with a little directorial restraint, or a deeper performance from the lead, Pineapple Express might have amounted to badly needed satire of the new-style, male-centric romantic comedy. If Rogen is going to grow as a performer, the insights in his writing need to infect his acting. As for Green, he doesn't act like he gives a shit. His artistic statement is right there on the poster: Put this in your pipe and smoke it.