The Pineapple Express

Bong-breakingly funny and sparkling with tasty one-liners, Pineapple Express is another dizzying trip through the shenanigans that solidify friendship between dudes.

A very funny stoner comedy that features a breakout comic performance from James Franco and borrows liberally and knowingly from the catalog of the ubiquitous Judd Apatow.

It's a quality movie even if the material is unworthy of the treatment. As a result, yes, it's a druggie comedy that made me laugh.

Not since Pulp Fiction plunged a needle in the heart of an overdose victim has drug comedy met drug violence with the pop of Pineapple Express.

It's a film in which one grown man dates a teenager, two grown men sell weed to schoolkids and a whole bunch of grown men vigorously circumvent American drug laws. But most of the time I laughed my head off, and I was sober as a judge.

Add about seven years to the ages of the kids in Superbad, toss in bullets, bongs and assassination squads, and you get some idea of the hot box of crazy that is Pineapple Express, a buddy movie stoned on its own shitfaced silliness.

It's a rare thriller that suggests intimacy is life's greatest treasure, and it's likely to put a lump in your throat even as you chuckle.

You don't have to be in an altered state to appreciate the ludicrous humor. The laughs -- mostly crude, profane and drug-addled -- are almost non-stop.

There are many things to like about Pineapple Express, an old-school action-comedy retooled as a stoner goof, but Franco's return to humor is a cause for celebration, or at least relief that he's finally come back to us.

It is one bumpy-funny, bong-smoke-filled ride, and maybe the best action film of the summer.

Pineapple Express doesn't know quite when to quit because the filmmakers can't seem to bear to cut all those jokes they laughed at watching the dailies. Even so, it's still one of the funniest entries from the Apatow stable.

The movie's tons of fun, and there are enough instantly iconic moments (like when Saul kicks his foot through the windshield of the stolen cop car he's driving) to make up for the disappointing ending.

Unapologetically politically incorrect and more than a bit fuzzy around the edges, Express nevertheless offers the funniest study yet of lightheaded drug culture.

Surprisingly, it's Franco, not Rogen, who steals the show with the best comic moments.

Imagine a Pulp Fiction starring the stoners from Knocked Up. That's Pineapple Express, a riotously funny introduction to a whole new genre of film -- the stoner action comedy.

Pineapple Express is one of the most hilarious and engaging films from producer Judd Apatow's often inconsistent comedy factory, thanks to inspired dialogue, dynamite chemistry between Rogen and Franco and perfectly pitched stoner gags.

While this R-rated comedy is oh so lite, it also builds to some endearingly goofball conclusions about friendship and maybe, just maybe, responsibility. Though there's a hazy quality to the latter.

Surely the first stoner comedy with a body count on par with your average Die Hard sequel.

Seth Rogen and James Franco come off like a Laurel and Hardy on, well, pot in this frenetic wild ride which mixes violence, drugs and laughs with such abandon you gotta love the audacity of it all.

It's very funny at times, and it's obvious that much more thought went into the script than into the last one flown under the Apatow banner, Step Brothers. But it tries to carry too much on its slender frame.

Pineapple Express is exceedingly crude, but it's never mean or lewd, and for all the drugs and gore in it, the movie is also strangely, unrelentingly sweet, even when its characters are bleeding to death after having been shot in the stomach.

Has enough heart and humor to merit a warning: Exposure to it qualifies as a contact high.

Cheech and Chong meet Quentin Tarantino in this uneven but entertaining mix of stoner humor and brutal violence.

Frequently hilarious, occasionally sweet and often graphically violent, Pineapple Express may not be the greatest stoner movie ever made, but it will do perfectly well until we get another hit of Harold and Kumar.

Clear-eyed and tack-sharp audiences with a taste for the willfully stupid should enjoy it as much as sedated ones.

How's this for a qualified endorsement: Pineapple Express is the least sex-and-bathroom gross-out and most intelligent of this summer's broad comedies. It's also the most violent and gory.

Pineapple Express is a rare thing: a stoner comedy where being stoned isn't a requirement to enjoying it.

Pineapple Express is the opposite of a chick flick. It's a movie for dudes. Call it Seth and the City.

It must have been bong hits all around from the moment everyone walked onto the set. Normally reliable actors break character, entire chunks of dialogue seem to be missing and plot threads are abandoned.

Among its achievements, Pineapple Express makes explicit much of the underlying homoeroticism inherent in the buddy movie.

All of the behavior in Pineapple Express seems to have been learned from watching Steven Seagal movies. Fortunately, the acting skills weren't.

Familiarity is perhaps the biggest liability here, in a film that's laugh-out-loud funny, consistently crude and excellently produced, another off the Judd Apatow assembly line of comedy hits.

Rogen and Goldberg's script cross-pollinates Cheech-and-Chong style stoner comedy with Tarantino-esque ultra-violence.

The movie is amusing in a verbally dissociated, been-there-toked-that way. Rogen and Franco make an amiably wacked comedy team -- it's like watching a buddy film with Albert Brooks and Joe Dallesandro.

Pineapple Express is so filled with verve and wit for much of its running time that it's depressing to watch it devolve into genuine foolishness and borderline incoherence in its final act.

Too stuffed with genres for its own good and too long for optimum impact, this movie will never win points for tidiness, but it compensates with plenty of sure-fire laughs.

Rogan is his usual self here, but Franco is a revelation, showing an unexpected knack for spaced-out comedy the way Matt Dillon did in Drugstore Cowboy.

Overlong and a bit too silly, even for its genre, the film nonetheless offers big laughs and a breakout performance from James Franco.

There's primo comedy in Pineapple Express, but also a lot of artistic stems sand seeds that could have been tossed away.

Pineapple Express definitely has a minor feel, a not-quite-finished-and-nobody-cares vibe, as befits its stoner story line.

The arthouse darling director Green plays against type and in the process has crafted a film that is at once elegant and sublimely silly.

Pineapple Express is fun, dopey (pun intended) fare that gets better treatment than its concept probably deserved thanks to the talent of its writers, cast and director.

There's a really nice, loose-limbed energy to the interactions between Mr. Rogen and his bong buddy, Mr. Franco. The best scenes in the movie occur between the two of them.

Those expecting a mellow ride and a case of the munchies might think all the bloodshed is a buzz kill -- shootings, stabbings, splattered brains, severed body parts, etc. So much for craving nachos...

Trying too hard to keep things lights amidst the violence is what ends up making Rogen and Goldberg's follow-up to Superbad more like Bad Boys or Rush Hour than Cheech & Chong.

Disappointingly, Pineapple Express is less than the sum of its ingredients, even if it's still a good stupid time at the movies.

The movie's a crazy quilt of pot jokes, sarcastic put-downs and pop culture references both obvious and obscure.

In its gleefully befogged first hour, Pineapple Express seems to be onto something new: It's a marijuana comedy that keeps shuffling genres, like a stoned blackjack dealer.

The film tries to fuse elements from the Harold & Kumar druggie comedies onto the violent buddy comedy-thriller Hot Fuzz. But it seems like the project was rushed into production before the script was even finished.

If Cheech and Chong ever made a movie for Quentin Tarantino, the result would be a lot like The Pineapple Express.

The movie's too long -- and the violence and mayhem are unexpectedly harsh and heavy -- but Franco's inspired, looped performance is right up there in the annals of reefer filmdom with Jeff Bridges' the Dude in The Big Lebowski.

Pineapple Express is also too long, but Franco should let his hair down more often and have a little fun because the audience will, too.

Despite a surprisingly exciting action-packed finale, the film's buddy-movie camaraderie seems a little forced, and the spaced-out dialogue doesn't deliver as often as it should.

Judd Apatow needs a closer. Maybe someone such as newly inducted baseball Hall of Fame pitcher Rich "Goose" Gossage can come in and shut the door on Apatow's funny but overlong films.

The movie isn't a relative of the Harold and Kumar movies, but a sarcastic cousin of Gregg Araki's woefully underseen Smiley Face.

Hop on the Pineapple Express and you're in for a mildly entertaining ride through lowbrow slapstick action violence.

The body count is large and the violence is quite nasty, which means that while you're getting high on life you could also be brought low by scenes of seriously gratuitous violence.

Alternating with the violence is a smart-alecky self-awareness broadcasting the fact that this is not a movie of the '80s but one that grew up on movies of the '80s.

It is uneven, overly long, makes utterly no sense -- but still manages to work as stoner escapism with a lot of pretty explosions.

Hollywood sure loves its stoners, and that tradition continues in Pineapple Express, a talky, scattershot, but imaginative rose bush of an action/comedy: We'll suffer its thorns because the petals are beautiful.

The plot is merely an excuse for the audience to get a giddy hit off some heady secondhand smoke while laughing and cheering at cartoon sadism that attempts (and fails) to put the slap back in slapstick.

The action and comedy mix has never been an easy one to manage, and unfortunately Pineapple Express fails in that respect almost completely.

There are wacky car chases, goofy run-ins with the law and with the killers along the way, as well as a perpetual air of silliness which, more often than being a good thing, seems forced.

Pineapple Express misses the buddy-action-comedy mark -- along with a stream of other similar films this year.

Too bad the movie eventually morphs into a relatively straight-forward action picture, with ninja assassins and, as they used to say on SCTV, things that "blowed up real good.

Watching good buds riff wears out its welcome after a half hour, and that's where a story really comes in handy. But when Pineapple goes from ganja to genre, it sours.

Even the name shows a lack of originality. Pineapple Express sounds more like a travelogue for train trips in Hawaii. But then again, this Express is one major train wreck.

The entire script is stuffed full of jokes that are just bad, and the bewildered audience sits there quietly aghast, wondering why the filmmakers thought to include them.

The film is an ecstatic celebration of adolescent crap, devoid of deconstructive finesse or even good action scenes.