Cheech and Chong, the progenitors (or, if you like, instigators) of drug humor, announced last week that they will be embarking on a reunion tour. The timing was brilliant, because this weekend millions of people are going to be watching this new Judd Apatow Inc. comedy about a pair of stoners and thinking how much funnier this kind of stuff was when C&C did it. Scripted by Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg (with story input by Apatow), Pineapple Express reunites Freaks and Geeks co-stars Rogen and James Franco as a slobby process server and his dope dealer. After Rogen witnesses a murder involving a renegade cop (Rosie Perez) and a drug lord (Gary Cole), the two are forced to go on the run. There are laughs from watching these guys reacting to a bad situation when they’re already suffering from dope paranoia. But as the style morphs into a self-conscious Quentin Tarantino clone (replete with Mr. Majestyk reference and gruesome ear-mangling scene), the film starts to play as if everyone involved was making it up as they went along. Improvisation is fine, but the trick is that you’re only supposed to keep the good stuff. Rogen and Goldberg also wrote Superbad, which this resembles in inverse proportion: The male-bonding comedy is displaced by the action stuff, which is played too straight to be taken as comic. And the rude adolescent dialogue is replaced by a lot of the kind of meandering babbling that sounds funny when you’re high—but only to you and whoever you’re getting high with. The director is indie wunderkind David Gordon Green, whose previous films (George Washington, All the Real Girls) displayed no affinity for comedy; he’s at a loss to pull much humor out of the material here, relying on the willingness of a certain audience to laugh at stoned characters. Enumerating the values of marijuana, one of our heroes notes that “It makes shitty movies better.” Pineapple Express may indeed be better if you go to it baked; still, for the price of a movie ticket you can really load up at Mighty Taco.

—m. faust