Pineapple Express

The Onion (A.V. Club) Scott Tobias

As loose and playful as major studio movies get.

USA Today Claudia Puig

The laughs -- mostly crude, profane and drug-addled -- are almost non-stop.

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.

Rolling Stone Peter Travers

You'll go limp from laughing.

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).

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.

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.

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.

Austin Chronicle Kimberley Jones

A film that is at once elegant and sublimely silly.

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.

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.

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.

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.

San Francisco Chronicle Peter Hartlaub

It's a funny, mostly harmless and entertaining film with a bad case of dry mouth.

Entertainment Weekly Owen Gleiberman

It ends up subverting its own subversion, arriving at a place that can only be called conventional.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

Premiere Eric Kohn

Never achieves greatness, but it has the right people in place to suggest the greatness that might have been.

Charlotte Observer Lawrence Toppman

The movie's a crazy quilt of pot jokes, sarcastic put-downs and pop culture references both obvious and obscure.

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.

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.

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."

Variety Justin Chang

This rambunctious paean to pot retains the trademark Apatow sweetness even as it careens from messy vulgarisms to even messier violence.

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.

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.

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.

LA Weekly Scott Foundas

The problem, dare I say it, is that the movie just ... isn't ... that ... funny.

Christian Science Monitor Peter Rainer

Goony, so-so comedy.

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.

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.

Baltimore Sun Michael Sragow

As an action comedy, it's just a bad trip.

New York Daily News Joe Neumaier

When "Pineapple" goes from ganja to genre, it sours.

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.

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.