You know, it can be tough to be stupid. Or, to be more accurate, it can be tough to operate at diminished capacity. Name for me, if you will, the last truly great stoner comedy. And I don't mean a comedy that happens to have a stoner character, nor do I mean a comedy in which the characters happen to get high once or twice. No, I mean a full on stoner comedy. It's harder than you might think and, depending on just how strictly you want to hold to the genre you may very well need to go all the way back to Dazed and Confused. And now that you've jumped through that particular hoop, name for me - if you will - the last stoner ACTION comedy. I doubt very much that you can, because as near as I can tell Pineapple Express is the first.

Seth Rogen is Dale Denton, a process server who gets through the tedium of his life with the help of talk radio, his still-in-high-school girlfriend and copious amounts of weed. To say that Denton is fond of the stuff is a gross understatement - he consumes it at a furious rate, pausing for a toke or two whenever he has time. Keeping him supplied? His local dealer Saul - played brilliantly by James Franco - himself a fairly sad and lonely figure, the high points of whose life are his satellite radio and three-ended 'cross joints'. Thrust together by circumstances and a shared love of cannabis the two are not exactly friends - though Saul clearly wants to be - but they do spend enough time together to bond over a hit of hugely potent Pineapple Express - a new strain of weed that Saul has just gotten the first shipment of anywhere in the world, a strain too good to share with anyone but his very best client, Dale. How good is it? As Dale says, "It smells like God's vagina."

Divine vagina or no, the Pineapple Express proves to be the undoing of our duo. Still puffing a joint of the stuff Dale arrives at his final work destination of the night. He must serve a subpoena to Ted (Gary Cole), a ruthless criminal who also happens to be the original source of the stuff. Ted? A little more concerned with killing a rival than with receiving papers, an execution he carries out with the help of a crooked lady cop right before Dale's horrified eyes. And Dale? Baked to the gills, Dale loses his shit and attracts a whole lot of attention to himself before tossing his roach out the window and making his escape. Ted + roach = direct path to Saul and Dale. And so the chase is on.

Now why, you may ask, are there so few good stoner comedies? Well, mostly because stoners aren't actually all that funny to anyone other than themselves. It's hard to make stoner jokes that a sober audience will enjoy for longer than five minutes at a stretch and yet Pineapple Express does exactly that. The addition of the action element certainly helps by throwing a few truly inspired set pieces into the mix but mostly it comes down to the interplay between Seth Rogen - also the film's co-writer - and James Franco. Rogen, surprisingly, is the straight man of the duo - well, straighter, anyway - while Franco turns in one of the most surprisingly convincing and charismatic performances of his career. Rogen is simply absent-minded high but Franco? Franco flits in and out of this plane of reality with surprising ease, spinning off into weird, stream of consciousness asides at the drop of a hat while simply trying to take good care of his grandmother and bring a new friend into his lonely world. And those action bits? Franco gets the best of those, too, his part in a high speed car chase - which I'll not spoil - an instant classic.

So it's funny, then? Hell, yes. You will laugh and you will laugh hard. But as funny as it is something still seems a little bit off, something that I put down largely to director David Gordon Green. Green's a very odd choice for a Judd Apatow produced comedy. Hell, Green's an odd choice for ANY comedy, his entire body of work up until now consisting of darkly intimate dramas such as George Washington and Undertow.

He's a great director, sure, but a great director for comedy? Green shoots and edits Pineapple Express like he would one of his dramas and while there's certainly a significant upside to this - a more typical comedy guy would have absolutely killed most of the humor by making it bigger and more obvious while Green lets it all flow naturally out of his characters - the pacing just feels odd, the rhythms strange for comedy and the action a little awkwardly staged. Green's quirks may not kill the film but they certainly don't help it, either.

Ultimately Pineapple Express is a lot like it's subject. You'll enjoy the hell out of it while it's happening but you'll need a little something more substantial to snack on later.