2011
90 minutes
rated R
by Scott Mendelson
Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle is arguably the best comedy of the prior decade. It's laugh-out-loud funny, but also filled with intelligent characters engaging in outlandish, but almost-plausible adventures in search of a most simple pleasure (a hamburger). It was crude, but not stupid about its raunch, and it created a wonderful 'this is America' tapestry that helped make it one of the finest films about race/ethnicity relations in modern cinema. Harold and Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay is every bit as lousy as most of us expected the first film to be. It's aimless, painfully unfunny, openly stupid, and trading in the sort of stock storytelling conventions ("Oh, that girl I dated for a few months in college is THE ONE who I must win back!") that the original avoided. More importantly, it's outright immoral in how it claims political topicality but sells the three biggest post-9/11 lies around (there are no innocent men in Gitmo, the post 9/11 abuses are the result of a few bad apples, and George W. Bush is really just 'one of us'). For better or worse, A Very Harold and Kumar Christmas isn't as offensive as the first sequel, but it's still a shockingly lazy, uninspired affair. It feels cheap and constrained, with only a handful of laughs and a narrative that sees fit to mostly replicate jokes from the first film. It's not as aggressively bad as the first sequel, but mere mediocrity is not something to aspire to.
