GAMES: GameSpot | GameFAQs | SportsGamer MUSIC: Last.fm | MP3.com MOVIES: Metacritic | Movietome TV: TV.com
Home | About Metacritic | About Metascores | What's New | Wireless Versions | Discussion Forums | Advertising Inquiries | Contact Us | RSS
Metacritic.com: We Deal With Criticism
     Help
> Switch to Advanced Search  
Film Video/DVD Music Games TV

Film

Upcoming Release Calendar
Weekend Box Office
Film Awards & Top 10s By Year
All-Time High Scores
All-Time Low Scores
How Metascores Are Calculated
Discuss Film In Our Forums

 

 

Limited Releases

sort by name sort by score

Stars indicate the most critically-acclaimed movies.

 



Printer-Friendly Version Email This Page Discuss In Our Forums

Pineapple Express
Columbia Pictures (Sony)

Pineapple Express reviews
Critic Score
Metascore: 64 Metascore out of 100
User Score  
7.1 out of 10
based on 37 reviews
Read critic reviews
How did we calculate this?
based on 96 votes
Read user comments
Rate this movie

MPAA RATING: R for pervasive language, drug use, sexual references and violence

Starring Seth Rogen, James Franco, Gary Cole, Rosie Perez, Danny R. McBride, Amber Heard, and James Remar

Lazy stoner Dale Denton has only one reason to visit his equally lazy dealer Saul Silver: to purchase weed, specifically, a rare new strain called Pineapple Express. But when Dale becomes the only witness to a murder by a crooked cop and the city's most dangerous drug lord, he panics and dumps his roach of Pineapple Express at the scene. Dale now has another reason to visit Saul: to find out if the weed is so rare that it can be traced back to him. And it is. As Dale and Saul run for their lives, they quickly discover that they're not suffering from weed-fueled paranoia; incredibly, the bad guys really are hot on their trail and trying to figure out the fastest way to kill them both. All aboard the Pineapple Express. (Sony Pictures)


GENRE(S): Comedy  |  Crime  |  Suspense/Thriller  
WRITTEN BY: Evan Goldberg (& story)
Seth Rogen (& story)
Judd Apatow (story)
 
DIRECTED BY: David Gordon Green  
RELEASE DATE: Theatrical: August 6, 2008 
RUNNING TIME: 107 minutes, Color 
ORIGIN: USA 

What The Critics Said

All critic scores are converted to a 100-point scale. If a critic does not indicate a score, we assign a score based on the general impression given by the text of the review. Learn more...

91
The Onion (A.V. Club) Scott Tobias
As loose and playful as major studio movies get.
Read Full Review
88
USA Today Claudia Puig
The laughs -- mostly crude, profane and drug-addled -- are almost non-stop.
Read Full Review
88
Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert
It's a quality movie even if the material is unworthy of the treatment. As a result, yes, it's a druggie comedy that made me laugh.
Read Full Review
88
Rolling Stone Peter Travers
You'll go limp from laughing.
Read Full Review
83
Seattle Post-Intelligencer Sean Axmaker
One of the most hilarious and engaging films from producer Judd Apatow's often inconsistent comedy factory, thanks to inspired dialogue, dynamite chemistry between Rogen and Franco and perfectly pitched stoner gags (undoubtedly the result of copious research).
Read Full Review
80
Washington Post Ann Hornaday
The movie is jampacked with jokes, sight gags and set pieces guaranteed to appeal to the audience's sense of the preposterous.
Read Full Review
80
Village Voice Robert Wilonsky
A savvy nod to 1980s action comedies, down to the Huey Lewis original that plays over the end credits. But its greatest achievements lie in the tossed-off non sequiturs, the pop-culture (and Scott Baio) allusions, and the unexpected respites in the midst of all the bang-bang-boom.
Read Full Review
80
Empire Damon Wise
Fans of David Gordon Green, you may well leave feeling confused. Fans of daft laughs and James Franco, you're in for one of the funniest comedies of the year.
Read Full Review
78
Austin Chronicle Kimberley Jones
A film that is at once elegant and sublimely silly.
Read Full Review
75
New York Post Lou Lumenick
Frequently hilarious, occasionally sweet and often graphically violent, Pineapple Express may not be the greatest stoner movie ever made, but it will do perfectly well until we get another hit of Harold and Kumar.
Read Full Review
75
Miami Herald Rene Rodriguez
Yes, Pineapple Express is exceedingly crude, but it's never mean or lewd, and for all the drugs and gore in it, the movie is also strangely, unrelentingly sweet, even when its characters are bleeding to death.
Read Full Review
75
TV Guide Ken Fox
Like the film's giddily intoxicating cannabis hybrid, Rogen and Goldberg's script cross-pollinates Cheech-and-Chong style stoner comedy with Tarantino-esque ultra-violence.
Read Full Review
75
ReelViews James Berardinelli
The humor in this movie is smart enough that even a moderate level of intoxication or inebriation is not necessary to enjoy it.
Read Full Review
75
San Francisco Chronicle Peter Hartlaub
It's a funny, mostly harmless and entertaining film with a bad case of dry mouth.
Read Full Review
75
Entertainment Weekly Owen Gleiberman
It ends up subverting its own subversion, arriving at a place that can only be called conventional.
Read Full Review
75
NPR Bob Mondello
Probably the most artful of the Apatow Factory comedies so far, but that's not to suggest it doesn't take being sweetly dumb just as seriously as the rest.
Read Full Review
75
Portland Oregonian Shawn Levy
So filled with verve and wit for much of its running time that it's depressing to watch it devolve into genuine foolishness and borderline incoherence in its final act.
Read Full Review
70
The Hollywood Reporter Michael Rechtshaffen
It's with that action aspect that Pineapple Express differs from Apatow's previous production output, and though, the words "taut" and "pulse-pounding" would never apply, the giddily over-the-top fight sequences, choreographed by veteran stunt coordinator Gary Hymes, handily compensate for the lag time.
Read Full Review
70
Slate Dana Stevens
Laugh for laugh, Pineapple Express is way funnier than "Superbad." It may be the funniest mainstream comedy released so far this year (not that that means much when you've got "The Love Guru" pulling down your average).
Read Full Review
63
The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Rick Groen
Perversely enough, the comedy is what keeps the picture rolling; it's the so-called action that persists in bringing the thing to a screeching halt.
Read Full Review
63
Premiere Eric Kohn
Never achieves greatness, but it has the right people in place to suggest the greatness that might have been.
Read Full Review
63
Charlotte Observer Lawrence Toppman
The movie's a crazy quilt of pot jokes, sarcastic put-downs and pop culture references both obvious and obscure.
Read Full Review
63
Boston Globe Ty Burr
Disappointingly, Pineapple Express is less than the sum of its ingredients, even if it's still a good stupid time at the movies.
Read Full Review
63
Chicago Tribune Michael Phillips
Around the midpoint, Pineapple Express falls apart and keeps falling, and the comedy, spiced with considerable, unevenly effective violence in that first hour, goes out the window, and in comes all the gore and the bone-crunching.
Read Full Review
63
Philadelphia Inquirer Steven Rea
The movie's too long - and the violence and mayhem are unexpectedly harsh and heavy - but Franco's inspired, looped performance is right up there in the annals of reefer filmdom with Jeff Bridges' the Dude in "The Big Lebowski."
Read Full Review
60
Variety Justin Chang
This rambunctious paean to pot retains the trademark Apatow sweetness even as it careens from messy vulgarisms to even messier violence.
Read Full Review
60
Los Angeles Times Jan Stuart
In the role of dramaturge, Rogen and his co-scripter Goldberg lack Apatow's discipline and deft hand for peripheral characters; the writing in Pineapple Express gets lazy whenever it strays too far from its central axis of players.
Read Full Review
60
The New York Times Manohla Dargis
It's an unshowy, generous performance [by Franco] and it greatly humanizes a movie that, as it shifts genre gears and cranks up the noise, becomes disappointingly sober and self-serious.
Read Full Review
60
Film Threat Pete Vonder Haar
Let's be honest; a great deal of the sh-- you find funny when you're high really isn't (as anyone who's smoked a few bowls and laughed like a hyena to "Assy McGee" can attest). So hopefully nobody will be too disappointed when I tell them that "Express" is largely hit and miss.
Read Full Review
60
LA Weekly Scott Foundas
The problem, dare I say it, is that the movie just ... isn't ... that ... funny.
Read Full Review
50
Christian Science Monitor Peter Rainer
Goony, so-so comedy.
Read Full Review
50
Chicago Reader J.R. Jones
Watching this is like watching kids play with Hot Wheels--not a bad time at all, but I wouldn't pay ten bucks for it.
Read Full Review
50
Time Richard Corliss
But it IS a movie about dopes: goofy guys, born without the ambition gene, and who would not survive a minute in the drug world, or the real one, without the guardian angel of a scriptwriter hovering to think them out of scrapes.
Read Full Review
42
Baltimore Sun Michael Sragow
As an action comedy, it's just a bad trip.
Read Full Review
40
New York Daily News Joe Neumaier
When "Pineapple" goes from ganja to genre, it sours.
Read Full Review
40
Salon.com Stephanie Zacharek
The picture is resolutely unhip and proud of it, which can be a good thing in the right hands or, in the wrong ones, just a gimmick. Nearly everything about Pineapple Express is a gimmick.
Read Full Review
40
New York Magazine David Edelstein
It's empty and formulaic, with plotting that's lazy even by stoner-comedy standards. Without all the yuck-o sight gags, it would be a huge bummer.
Read Full Review

What Our Users Said

Vote Now!The average user rating for this movie is 7.1 (out of 10) based on 96 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.

David gave it a2:
I cannot see how people say this is a good movie. This is the only Seth Rogan movie I haven't liked. Long boring opening, no climax or anything that makes you *want* to see the ending, dull humor, dragged on story... blah see it high if anything. It could of been a great movie, but it was likely rushed for the summer crowd.

Ashly E. gave it an8:
If you take away the weed its still a pretty good movie, although the weed makes the movie.. i love that the ending took so long because really how long do you think it would take a bunch of pot heads to fight to the death?? Awhile!!

Mathieu R. gave it a10:
Wow!! This movie is a masterpiece! Make sure to smoke some good weed before going watch this movie!

Daniel C. gave it a7:
This is a solid stoner flick, but seemed to drag on slightly at the end. I would give the edge to Forgetting Sarah Marshall.

Harley Dog gave it a1:
I left halfway through. And I have a very open mind about humor and movies in general. It was just tired and lacked anything to keep me there. How it got as good of ratings as it did is amazing.

Ryan D. gave it a10:
An instant classic, I hate slapstick, but this so well done, I was laughing until I couldn't breath the whole through. I don't know why this got so low scores, the whole theator was going crazy when I saw it.

Bill C. gave it an8:
Like all of Seth Rogan's work , this film delivers on what it promises. Not too serious /factual , just a funny film.Your having a good enough timewatching that the way over the top stunts and fights are never an issue.

Read more user comments...

Discuss this movie in our forums

Return to top of page
Home | FILM | DVD/VIDEO | MUSIC | GAMES | TV | Forums | About Metacritic metacritic.com

Popular on CBS sites: MLB | Spore | iPhone 3G | Paris Hilton | Antivirus Software | GPS | Recipes | Shwayze | NFL

About CBS Interactive | Jobs | Advertise

© 2008 CBS Interactive Inc. All rights reserved. | Privacy Policy | Terms of Use