Pineapple Express is not very funny, despite the buried one-liners that are fired into the audience like cheap tees at a regional hockey game. The set-up was nice and simple but it just went nowhere. Seth Rogin, James Franco, and Danny McBride are passable in their roles but the film lacked the energy and the all-important pacing that comedies, especially stoner comedies, require.

I dunno.

If I go back and watch Cheech and Chong movies, maybe I will feel that they too are missing something, or, fall way short of funny. Part of the appeal of these types of films should be a sense of going in an unexpected direction, surprise, like the mind tends to do when high as a barrel full of monkeys. Harold and Kumar do a better job at this. I knew where this film was going right from the get-go (and so did the audience I watched it with in a Long Beach multiplex) and by the third act I was looking at my watch.

DG Green phoned in the direction, maybe at the behest of Apatow Inc., but still: Give the audience a bit of credit, high or not, and surprise them. I can’t give Green and Rogin a pass just because they say they are paying homage to a certain kind of buddy-action-stoner-whatever comedy from the past.