Gratuitous violence just doesn't make me laugh like it used to

So I went and saw Pineapple Express today and, while overall I enjoyed it, I was surprised by the number of times I thought to myself, "Well, that was unnecessarily violent." How could this be that I no longer found excessive, mindless violence in the name of comedy to be, well, funny?

If you haven't seen the film, oh there's no reason not to check it out. I mean, it's a not particularly a "have to see it in the theater" experience, but it's worth watching. It starts out strong, slows down some, gets kinda mindless and out of hand and then, at the final scene, it's back to being very well done.

If I were a thinking man, I'd say it's some kind of metaphor or somethin'.

If you don't know what it's about, imagine a Cheech and Chong film with action and a mostly thought-out plot. And, in between all the weed smoking, there's a good amount of sometimes oddly graphic violence.

*SPOILER ALERT*

I can't keep talking about the film without mentioning what actually happens. So if you don't care if parts get ruined, keep reading. If you do, visit the old site for a while (link in upper right of page).

It's not all the violence in the film I think is gratuitous, far from it, but there are a few scenes where I wondered, "Why even add that in? It's not funny, it doesn't advance the plot, and were it not there the scene could have been even tighter."

1. The police car chase - When Saul stops the car and the policewoman starts firing at him, one of the bullets, we're shown by way of a cut, hits a bystander. Okay, now what? We already knew she was a bad cop, it's not like that's some kind of turning point for her character.

And it didn't even hit a ha-ha bystander like a mime or, since the movie's produced by Judd Apatow's company, a humorous minority, it was just some white dude.

2. Red shooting off Matheson's foot - First he drives over the guy, which is fine, but why show him blowing off his dead foot? It was like Robocop minus the veiled anti-facsism message. Any laughs it generated were more from shock than anything else.

3. Ted's body after the bomb blast - Did they really need to hire Rick Baker for just the one scene? Seriously, comedy bomb blast victim = not moving + sooty face + singed hair. That's it. Done. Don't need the bubbly 4th degree burn look on the trunk of the body or whatever they were going for.

4. Killing off Bill Hader right at the beginning - Come on, his five minutes were better than the middle thirty of the movie. Again, his offscreen death was one of those shock laughs and really, I think, it traded off for giggles a character that could have been used later on.

Now, I'm no big-time comedy writer or anything, but I've seen enough dumb-ass movies to know that there's nothing funnier than revealing a guy, late into a movie, who everyone thought had died years ago.

You mean to tell me it wouldn't have been a bigger laugh for to him wander out in the middle of the big fight scene, after years of hiding and subsisting on pot? He could have even popped up from behind the wall Gary Cole knocks a hole in with his realistically charred midsection.

I don't know, that's just four things I thought of off the top of my head that bothered me. Yet, I know if I had seen this movie at 18 or 19 I would have laughed my head off and not blinked twice at any of it.

I wonder if it's because I've already seen it so many times that a shock laugh just isn't funny anymore, or if I feel like overworking a joke with violence is lazy and therefore a waste of my time. I really don't know. Maybe I think I know better than the writers, and I can see where they're pandering and taking the easy joke over really trying.

Because, certainly, there's a place for over-the-top violence. I'm not trying to come off like some anti-movie violence crusader or anything, but in the context of this film I just didn't see the point in many cases, why the writers and director took the extra-realistic and brutal step for what, essentially, is a comedy buddy picture.

But, oh well, not my movie. Though, and I'll say, if I were the editor, I'd take the first twenty-five minutes, paste on the last ten minutes, and you've got yourself a great short film.