‘Pineapple Express’ watches the Judd Apatow train roll on

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 Cannonball Run.

Aping the feel of ’80s action-comedies—dig the ending Huey Lewis song—Seth Rogen’s and Evan 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 twenty 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 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?

PINEAPPLE EXPRESS DIR. DAVID GORDON GREEN | RATED R | OPENS FRI AT THEATERS EVERYWHERE

Tags: Film, judd apatow, pineapple express, Reviews, seth rogen