You'd expect CelebStoner to give two big green thumbs up for Pineapple Express, David Gordon Green's stoner-action flick starring Seth Rogen and James Franco. But what did the nation's critics think? Most liked the movie, though some said it comes "off the rails" in the violent third act.

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

Pineapple Express has all the elements you'd expect from the genre: male bonding, immature sexual desires, verbal scatology, formidable drug abuse, fight scenes, gunfire, explosions. Yawn? Not this time. 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.

Owen Gleiberman, Entertainment Weekly

As Pineapple Express turns into a deranged vehicle of slapstick mayhem, with people getting smashed in the head with coffeepots, its charm begins to ebb away. The movie wants to be a jolly dope spree turned nightmare - just because you're paranoid doesn't mean that vicious thugs aren't trying to dismember you! - but it ends up subverting its own subversion, arriving at a place that can only be called conventional.

Kurt Loder, MTV

It may have been an intriguing idea to combine pot-fogged comedy with the chattering Uzis of the action genre, but it's not particularly rewarding here. It isn't endless explosions and flying bodies we want from this sort of movie. We want more stoned babble, more of Saul saying things like "The monkey's outta the bottle, man." We want that pure, ineffable whatever.

Peter Hartlaub, San Francisco Chronicle

It's a funny, mostly harmless and entertaining film with a bad case of dry mouth... A crime comedy-drama that's two parts Cheech and Chong and one part To Live and Die in L.A.. It's reminiscent in tone of Doug Liman's underrated druggie dramedy Go, except this movie is way less tightly paced, and has almost no major female characters.

Richard Corliss, Time

Pineapple Express aims for nothing more than rowdy fun. Still, director David Gordon Green — who has made some terrific indie movies about isolated youths (George Washington) and probably took this job cause he wanted to make a movie more than a handful of people would see — mixes all the ingredients to create a comedy that brings a nicely deflating note of realism to action-film mayhem, as well as being one of the few drug movies you don't have to be high to enjoy.

Robert Wilonsky, Village Voice

Don't be fooled by its head-shop appeal: Pineapple Express, like Knocked Up but ultimately much, much better, is a stoner's movie that ultimately decides it's time to put down the Bong Mitzvah (a water pipe purchased in Tel Aviv, natch) and get shit done.

Manohla Dargis, New York Times

In the tradition of Cheech & Chong, Abbott and Costello, Hope and Crosby, Ricky and Lucy, Martin and Lewis, Rowan and Martin, Smothers and Smothers, Sanford and son, Spicoli and Hand, Bert and Ernie, Riggs and Murtaugh, cops and robbers, dumb and dumber, right brain and left, peanut butter and jelly, bong hit, roach clip and Snoop Doggy Dogg comes Pineapple Express, a stoner comedy that partakes of a gentle indie vibe before hitting the hard stuff for a major Shane Black-style blowup and meltdown.

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