The latest brainchild of Superbad writers Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, Pineapple Express fits comfortably into the canon of classic stoner-buddy comedies which revel in the misadventures and male comraderie associated with the illegal herb. Like previous entries such as Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle and Cheech and Chong's Up in Smoke, a summary of the plot reads like either a "what if" story thought up while stoned or one of those exaggerated but hilarious stories your friends tell you after a night of smoking ("I swear, we were lost in the woods and thought that the cops could find us by triangulating our cell phones, so we tried to destroy them"). But like Harold and Kumar, Pineapple Express is smarter than to simply assume that THC-laced giggling is enough to support an entire film. In addition to its parable of homosocial bonding over the love of weed, it manages to execute a clever parody of drug-phobic action films with at least a semblence of political awareness.

The film opens with a black-and-white prologue set in 1937, around the time that the infamous anti-cannabis propaganda film Reefer Madness was released. After being sassed by a test subject high on the drug, a dictatorial commander of a secret underground base shouts his verdict into a telephone: "ILLEGAL!" Seventy years later, subpoena server Dale Denton (Rogen) is driving down the street smoking a joint and telling talk radio DJs over the phone his feelings on the legalization of marijuana. Part of his argument is that criminalizing marijuana forced otherwise respectable potheads like himself to deal with criminals and creepy drug dealers.

Pineapple Express may try to convince us that potheads are not necessarily people who deserve our ire (not that its intended audience would believe that anyway), but it doesn't shrink from the idea that perhaps people like Denton are, well, losers. Dale, 25, is dating high-schooler Angie (Amber Heard) and feels superior to his drug dealer Saul (James Franco) even though he seems to be Dale's only other source of social interaction. Even so, his relatively innocent search of a decent high is not deserving of the quagmire in which he finds himself trapped, witnessing a murder committed by Saul's supplier Ted (Gary Cole), who also happens to be Dale's next subpoena target. Unable to go to the police, who are implicated in the murder, and unable to trust anyone but Saul, he and his harmless drug dealer must evade Ted's hitmen and the numerous shady characters involved in the illegal drug trade.

If the point of all of this is that marijuana is essentially a "harmless" drug that is only made more dangerous by its illegality, that point is made early and quickly, but afterward the film doesn't lose its charm or cleverness. It is, on some level, a parody akin to Hot Fuzz with a little bit of The Big Lebowski thrown in, pitting stoners against traditional genre film villains. Like Jeff Bridges's "Dude" Lebowski, Dale and Saul are "not very functional" when they're stoned, but they still manage to navigate their way through the same plot as traditional action heroes, making the same decisions if not executing them as well. Throwing two young stoners in the place of Arnold Schwarzenegger is funny by itself, but with Rogen and Goldberg's script and hilarious improvisation by Franco, Rogen, and Danny McBride and you have a film that's nothing short of hilarious.

Part of Pineapple Express's humor comes from its willingness to humanize everyone, another way to deftly parody traditional drug-centered action films. It resists turning even the ruthless hitmen and criminals into completely one-dimensional or cartoonish characters. The biggest laughs centered around these dangerous people don't come from broad pratfalls or exaggerated criminal posturing. The tense working relationship between hitmen Budlofsky (Kevin Corrigan) and Matheson (Craig Robinson) is amusing in its banality, with Budlofsky focused on getting home to dinner with his wife, even refusing a hit off a joint because "she can smell it on my sweater." When hit over the head with a coffee pot and later shot, instead of traditional villainous posturing Matheson sobs, complaining, "I never been shot before." Even Ted, clearly the most evil and unstable of the untrustworthy characters, has his moments of basic human sympathy; these are the kind of absurd truisms that make up great comedy and add another level of enjoyment to Pineapple Express's already stacked comedy deck.

I had to raise my eyebrows at the depiction of the Asian gang which is at war with Ted's organization. The initial jokes, mocking jackass dealer Red's (McBride) ignorance of different Asian gangs and cultures, were amusing, but this soon gave way to boring, borderline-offensive stereotypes which just don't do it for me. The Asian gang of mysterious national/cultural origins are not in the film for long, but they play an important role in the climax which seems like a mere attempt to squeeze more goofy Asian stereotypes into an already funny movie. Pineapple Express did not really need these characters, at least not the way they are depicted, and it is a shame that it brings itself down to that level in the last twenty minutes of the film.

It is with the Asian characters, and not with the explosive climax as many critics have claimed, that Pineapple Express weakens in its third act. The violent, action-filled climax suits the idea of placing these normal stoner kid characters in over their head in the plot of an action film. It may not be as hilarious as the rest of the film, but it fits in with what the film was trying to accomplish. Exaggerated and fantastical events do not clash with the idea of a stoner-buddy comedy: after all, Harold and Kumar rode a cheetah through the New Jersey woods. Overall, Pineapple Express is destined to become a classic of this "genre," even if it is an atypical entry.