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Review: Harold and Kumar Make One Trip Too Many

Friday, 25 April 2008

Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay

While Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay isn’t the worst, most insipid thing I’ve seen this year, it certainly is the most disappointing. I loved the first film. While juvenile, lowbrow and occasionally tasteless, Harold and Kumar go to White Castle was funny. Very funny. It took the magic that worked in the old Cheech and Chong movies and dressed it up for a whole new generation. Silly, outrageous and at times utterly ridiculous, at its heart the film was playing upon the inherent racism not just prevalent in white culture, but in all colors and creeds. It made fun of EVERYONE. White, black, yellow, brown –- Harold and Kumar didn’t care. The movie went for it. Even the advertising made fun of itself, proudly proclaiming that it was “Starring that Indian Guy from Van Wilder and the Asian guy from American Pie.”

So it was with great sadness and a head hung low that I walked out of this pathetically lame attempt at following up what has become an underground classic. And it’s not that the film was just another in a long string of cash grabs in which no one appears to even be really trying. At its heart, I think they had something really profound to say. But like the State of the Union read by a stuttering high school dropout –- you get what they’re trying to say, but it’s just painful and annoying to watch.

The film picks up an hour after the first film, with our heroes racing off to Amsterdam so Harold can win the love of the girl of his dreams. Sadly, this isn’t a crazed European adventure fraught with strange new characters. Instead, Harold and Kumar get themselves confused with terrorists and get thrown into Guantanamo Bay. Fortunately for our heroes, Guantanamo proves remarkably easy to escape from, and the two embark on a cross-country trek to clear their name.

Escape From Guantanamo ’s chief flaw isn’t what it is trying to say, but rather how it goes about saying it. This film will offend pretty much every Red State sensibility you may have. It is a full frontal assault on the War on Terror, the Department of Homeland Security, and the current administration. But it is done through a chorus of bathroom humor, lame over-the-top raunch, and a bevy of jokes that fail to even come close to the sharply honed jabs of even the previous film. The result is a non-stop groan fest that offends pretty much everyone without ever being as profound as it seemingly wants to be.

There are some bits that work, a few jokes that fire on all cylinders, but for the most part you feel pretty embarrassed laughing at them. Once you’ve endured ten minutes of humorless debauchery, it's hard to acknowledge that you might be lowbrow enough to even admit that you find any of it funny. Although every moment with Neil Patrick Harris is pure comedy gold. I don’t care how bad a movie this is, the moment he strolls on screen it achieves the very best that the previous film had to offer. Sorry to say, he leaves almost as quickly as he arrives and the film returns to the unapologetically meandering mess it was.

I wanted to love this. Hell, I at least wanted to really like it. Its heart is in the right place, but its humor is in the gutter. If you can imagine a rambling rant about everything that’s wrong with this country, told by someone baked to the gills on illicit substances and equally amused by his own flatulence, then you can, for one brief moment, imagine what it is like to watch Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay .

D-