Stoner movies, by definition, are lazy creatures. They feature, well, stoners smoking marijuana, getting paranoid, coming across countless unlikely scenarios in which their senses are dulled by the reefer and munchie sessions with the closest bag of cheese puffs they can grab. It's a tried and true formula, one meant to attract plenty of “huh, huh, huh” chuckles throughout its audience, many members of which can probably relate to a good share of what their anti-heroes onscreen are going though.

Well, Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg (the screenwriting duo who brought us “Superbad,” and who, along with producer Judd Apatow, have largely changed the face of comedy in the past several years with their brand of raunchy but heartfelt films) decided to do a stoner movie with some ambition.

All aboard the “Pineapple Express.” Getting its name from a particularly sweet strain of cannabis, the film incorporates traditional stoner humor with lots of gunshots, martial arts and fight scenes. Equal parts “Superbad,” “Cheech and Chong,” “Pulp Fiction" and the TV series “Starsky and Hutch,” it's a bit of a hodgepodge effort, although when it's firing on all cylinders, it can be at least as entertaining as a rerun of “227.”

Rogen plays Dale Denton, a drug smoker who happens to be able to hold down employment as a process server (i.e. a subpoena hander outer). When he witnesses a murder among members of opposing drug cartels, he unwillingly becomes part of the war on drugs.

Dale's dealer, Saul Silver (James Franco, “Spider-Man 3”) is a considerably less functioning member of society than Denton. To be blunt, he smokes marijuana all day, and he's darn good at it. Together, the two of them spend most of the movie on the run from drug kingpin Ted Jones (Gary Cole, who no matter how many roles I see him in will always be remembered as the annoying boss Bill Lumbergh on “Office Space”).

Rosie Perez, playing a crooked cop, gets her most memorable role since 1992's “White Men Can't Jump.” No, I couldn't think of another film she's been in since that one, either.

As Dale says to a radio talk show host at the beginning of “Pineapple,” marijuana makes crappy films better. While neither calling this a crappy film nor advocating the use of an illegal substance, would a chemical influence of some sort have made “Pineapple” a better movie? It probably wouldn't hurt.

“Pineapple” is best when it sticks to the rude, crude and obnoxious stoned slacker material, as it does in the beginning 30 minutes. For this portion, the film is downright hilarious, with Rogen and Franco bouncing one-liners off each other.

After that, the whole action material starts to be spread a little thin, and I caught myself losing interest in the goings-on of Dale and Saul -- namely because it's hard to be as funny when you're kicking bad guy butt as it is when you're coming up with insane, chemically induced observations on life. It still has its moments, but they become increasingly more sporadic as the movie goes on.

At times, the mood felt a little too paranoid for my liking, with tons of yelling, fighting and car chases that seemed to be there for the sole purpose of justifying the film's nearly two-hour running time (one bad tendency of the Rogen/Goldberg/Apatow films is they tend to run nearly two hours, which is almost always 20-30 minutes too long for a comedy).

Preliminary reviews touted “Pineapple Express” as the greatest stoner movie ever. Is it?

Nah. However, it may be the most aspiring stoner movie ever.

Hmm, maybe Rogen and company would have been better off just saying 'no' to all that ambition.