Harold And Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay

This has to be one of the most insane, surreal and enjoyably stupid movie experiences to be had in quite a while. The often-asked joke question, “What were these guys smoking?” doesn’t really need to be asked, the film is full of weed, 'shrooms, unicorns, naked women, naked men, officious and mentally deficient anti-terrorist officials, nerdy-but-intelligent intelligence agency types, inbred rednecks, the Ku Klux Klan, a brothel of gun-toting prostitutes, Neil Patrick Harris, preppy republican bastards, racial stereotypes, and well, the list goes on. And the weird thing is, if you just go with it, it’s actually quite a fun ride. It’s like the first film (Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle, 2004), only with everything amped up. Instead of a desire for burgers, they want to avoid being violated in an anti-terrorist prison. Instead of travelling down the road, they travel half the country. It’s bigger and stupider and slyly (and not so slyly) picking apart the state of the US, post 9/11.

Writer/directors Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg are not saying anything particularly new, but rather poke fun at everything that creates and fuels collective paranoia. A great early scene has Kumar pulled aside at the airport for a security check. When he cries foul and accuses the guard of racial profiling, it quickly descends into picking on the guard’s blackness, or lack thereof. It’s a pretty good indicator of what’s to come, juvenile humour that satirises the fear of otherness. Another incredibly silly scene has a translator attempting to understand the “Korean” spoken by Harold’s parents. (They’re just speaking English.) The film really does require you to let go of any notion of common sense or narrative purpose. A whole bunch of scenes are just there for the sake of pillorying stereotypes. But given it’s a road movie, that’s kind of what you expect: A series of short vignettes that don’t necessarily have any purpose in themselves besides giving a foil for our heroes to work against. The best bit, as with the first film, is Neil Patrick Harris parodying himself as a crazed lunatic. It’s hysterical stuff, assuming you’ve already laughed at what came before.

The film does eventually get around to its very basic plot of trying to win back the girl, and simultaneously avoid being sent back to Guantanamo. The trick is their hope of rescue lies with the girl’s fiancé. You already know what’s going to happen, sort of. But since this is a film that has George W. Bush smoking weed and telling our protagonists not to trust the government, but just love your country, it plays out with a twist or two. Harold And Kumar 2 is not gonna win awards, and it might not even be worth your cinema dollars, but it’s definitely going to do good business on a weekend DVD hire with beer and pizza and maybe a little of something else…

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