Pineapple Express (2008)

Pineapple Express arrives from the summer of 2008, a stoner action comedy in which a process server and his marijuana dealer witness a murder and spend the remainder of the runtime fleeing the consequences. The film was directed by David Gordon Green, written by Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, and produced under the Apatow banner. It grossed one hundred million dollars and later lent its name to a real cannabis strain. None of this suggests a film carrying any of the progressive cargo we are tasked with cataloguing, and the record bears that out. There is no agenda here, only a great deal of smoke and a running time that could have been shorter.

The cast includes Rosie Perez as a corrupt police officer, Craig Robinson as a hitman, and a Korean gang operating in the margins of the drug trade. These figures exist as plot mechanics and comic textures. The film never pauses to interrogate them, and it never asks us to. The female characters are a high school girlfriend and a grandmother who arrives at the end to drive everyone to the hospital. Gender is not a subject. Race is not a subject. The criminal economy is presented as a nuisance, not a system. There is nothing to eat, and no rich to eat it.

What remains is a comedy of male friendship, stoner logic, and bodily injury. It has no interest in lecturing anyone about anything, which in the current climate reads almost as a novelty. We assign it the emptiest of ledgers: zero across every column, a clean sheet, an artifact from before the syllabus was distributed. A curious vintage. Dry, unfashionable, and entirely content to be so.