Tropic Pineapple: Less Action, More Laughin'

The summer's big comedies can be as tedious as the genres they satirize.

I don’t see many comedies in the theater, mainly because I usually end up feeling like Homer Simpson after he had that crayon removed from his brain before taking in the latest comedy starring Julia Roberts and Richard Gere. With his newfound intelligence, Homer feels confused, concerned and a little frightened by how much the audience is laughing at the banal, predictable jokes of Love is Nice.

While that episode of The Simpsons poked as much fun at humorless eggheads who take themselves far too seriously as it did the pervasive shallowness of American culture, that particular joke — coming as it did from comedy writers in the biz — was particularly astute.

For the past few years, though, the extended Judd Apatow clan has been producing comedies that appeal to both the slob and the snob. The irreverent, adolescent brand of humor found in these films works in a similar way as Apatow’s Freaks and Geeks geeks’ favorites, The Jerk and Stripes — the jokes are so intentionally cornball and absurd, and the characters so likeable, it’s hard not to be won over by how much fun everyone seems to be having. This combination was especially winning in Superbad, perhaps Apatow’s supreme achievement as producer thus far.

To be sure, his movies aren’t all good all the time, and too much self-indulgent improv was allowed into Knocked Up’s laborious running time. And did the world really need such a transparent knockoff of Superbad as Drillbit Taylor from the same producer? There was every reason to hope, however, that Pineapple Express would be another unqualified success: a screenplay by Superbad’s Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, the reunion of Freaks and Geeks’ Rogen and James Franco (the actor everyone assumed would be the series’ break-out star), and perhaps most crucially, the choice of art house auteur David Gordon Green as director.

Unfortunately, what looks good on paper doesn’t always look good on celluloid (or digital projection), and Express never quite manages to gather all its interesting parts into a successful whole.  Actually the film does look great, Green and his regular cinematographer Tim Orr giving the film’s design more care and attention than most comedies receive or deserve.

Things start off fine enough, too, carried along by drug dealer Franco’s affable charm and the easy chemistry between he and Rogen, who plays (surprise!) a slacker stoner. But it all heads south soon after Rogen witnesses a drug-related murder and he and Franco must run from bumbling hit men (Kevin Corrigan and Craig Robinson, who are frequently the funniest parts of the film), with the film reveling in B-movie action antics.

What the filmmakers have tried to do is create a synthesis of comedy and action, not in a Will Smith/Martin Lawrence Bad Boys way, but via an ironic parody of ’80s movies like Commando and Death Wish. Green has spoken in interviews about his love for the cheesy ’80s action movies produced by Cannon Films, and in a way it was bold of he and the writers to go so far in recreating the look, music and dialogue from an era the majority of the movie’s target audience won’t even remember. They also earn points for being the first to reference a genre someone was bound to cannibalize soon enough, but points must be deducted for a too-strict adherence to the rules of the action game, especially in the excruciatingly long and tedious ending. In the end, the whole exercise feels like a moderately amusing 15-minute YouTube concept on steroids, and while it looks like it probably was a riot to make, that sense of fun doesn’t amply extend into the audience.

Tropic Thunder tries a similar comedy/action synthesis, albeit in a much more traditional Hollywood summer blockbuster sort of way. Surprisingly, this is to its advantage. The script is admittedly more standard, but the pacing is more brisk and the jokes more frequent, funnier and in general more intelligent than in Express.