Stoner comedies have the major built-in advantage
of playing to an audience that's herbally inclined to laugh at anything, but
that knowledge can breed laziness, because there's little motivation for
sharpening the jokes. Harold
& Kumar Go To White Castle and its equally winning sequel, Harold & Kumar
Escape From Guantanamo Bay, don't seem to have anyone manning the quality-control department:
Some gags are inspired in their extreme crudeness and toked-up surrealism, and
others are simply lazy and base, targeted at the sniggering 14-year-old boys
who snuck into the back row of the theater. Yet the bad stretches in both movies
are more easily forgiven and forgotten than they would be in other comedies,
because John Cho's Harold and Kal Penn's Kumar make such amiable company. Their
shambling, seat-of-the-pants misadventures are written like a pot-addled
free-association game, and it's fun to go along for the ride.
Kicking off the morning after their triumphant
visit to White Castle, Escape
From Guantanamo Bay
finds Harold and Kumar gearing up for an impromptu trip to Europe, where Harold
hopes to meet up with his new girlfriend. The troublemaking Kumar smuggles some
weed on board the plane to Amsterdam—which is a little like smuggling a
hooker into a whorehouse—but when his smokeless bong is mistaken for a
bomb, the two are apprehended as terrorists and shipped off to Gitmo. The
mix-up seems easily resolveable, but an overzealous Homeland Security official
(Rob Corddry) sees Harold and Kumar as some sort of North Korean/al-Qaeda
alliance and locks them up. They manage to escape to the Deep South, but with
Corddry and his team on their trail, clearing their names isn't easy.
Though the detour to Guantanamo Bay allows for some
broad, none-too-successful swipes at the War On Terror, the film mostly riffs
on cultural clashes much like the first one did, presenting America as not so
much a melting pot as a lumpy bouillabaisse. As Harold and Kumar wind through
the South, they stumble upon all sorts of redneck stereotypes, but
writer-directors Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg indulge in them and mock
them simultaneously, like having backwoods Alabama shack-dwellers live like the
Upper East Side elite, while still keeping their one-eyed inbred spawn in the
basement. The big payoff, of course, is Neil Patrick Harris reprising his role
as "Neil Patrick Harris," former child star turned hard-living, 'shroom-chowing
horndog. Any comedy zany enough to include a veiled, left-field reference to Clara's Heart has something going for it.