I’d made my mind up about Pineapple Express long before its final scene: I think it was the bit where a gorgeous blond woman assured Seth Rogen’s character that he was funny and sexy and totally awesome — in a movie co-written by Seth Rogen — that triggered my Bullshit Alarm. But seeing the aforementioned writer-star breakfasting in a diner with co-stars James Franco and Danny McBride, all ostensibly in character, chewing over waffles and the awesome stupidity of their adventures (you know, just like you and your friends totally would after the movie) prompted actual rage.

Obviously, a lot of people won’t have the same reaction to this allegedly affable smugness: Pineapple Express is being sold (and will be embraced) as Superbad on steroids, with stoner twentysomethings (Rogen and Franco, playing potheads on the run from drug dealers) substituted for beer-seeking teenagers, topped off with great, heaping gobs of post-Tarantino slapstick violence.

There’s something sadistic about so much cartoon brutality when the film consistently reminds us how much it hurts. And Pineapple Express’s stupid-movie-isms (car chases, fist fights, shootouts) aren’t deployed satirically. The film is an ecstatic celebration of adolescent crap, devoid of deconstructive finesse or even good action scenes. The stifling atmosphere of arrested development extends also to the underlying Apatowian “bros before hos” attitude: a scene where Rogen’s aforementioned girlfriend blubbers about how much she misses her feckless, shaggy man-child now that he’s on the run is one of the most embarrassing movie moments of the year.

There are other disparaging things to say about Pineapple Express — e.g., that former art-house great-white-hope David Gordon Green isn’t exactly a dab hand at comedy — but what’s the point? It’s nothing the movie doesn’t already know: that last scene is Rogen and Co.’s escape hatch, a master class in the simultaneous having and eating of cake. Forgive me for hoping that they choke. 

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