According to the law of sequels, the stoner comedy Harold & Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay should represent a steep quality decline in the saga of our two favourite college-educated pot-heads.
Happily, it's more of a slight gradient than a drop, and a thumbs-up second-effort laughfest (three thumbs up if, like Neil Patrick Harris, you're out of your mind on 'shrooms).
What's missing is the surprise and purity of purpose that informed the original Harold & Kumar Go To White Castle. The simple premise of two otherwise over-achieving children-of-immigrants getting baked and going on a burger hunt of Odyssean proportions was charm itself (if you can use that word for a movie that includes a bathroom stall game called Battlesh--s).
Yes, Harold & Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay has a more contrived plot. But that really doesn't matter, since the "Escape" part happens within the first act, setting up what the twisted Harold & Kumar braintrusts really do best -- create deranged set-pieces, one after another.
When we re-meet our heroes, a few years have passed since White Castle, Kumar's ex-girlfriend Vanessa (Daneel Harris) is about to marry an arrogant prep-boy named Colton with connections to the Bush administration (Eric Winter). So, after a completely gratuitous "dump" scene and masterbation interlude, Harold (John Cho) & Kumar (Kal Penn) are off to the cannabis cafes of Amsterdam -- Kumar to forget his lost love and Harold to chase after a model he's newly in love with.
Alas, Harold's rendezvous is not to be. Kumar is discovered on the plane in possession of a new invention -- a smokeless bong -- which is naturally assumed to be a bomb, prompting a pile-on of air marshalls in-flight. The plane is turned back and, faced with a Korean-American and an Indian-American, a Homeland Security official (the Daily Show's Rob Corddry) makes the only logical conclusion -- North Korea and Al Qaeda have joined forces.
Next stop: Camp X-Ray, where it turns out the inmates are routinely forced to perform sexual favours for the guards. Taking advantage of a sex-slave revolt (and a corpse-ladder over an electric fence), H&K find themselves on a Cuban refugee raft and a subsequent series of adventures through the U.S. South that have nothing whatsoever to do with Guantanamo Bay.
Said adventures (each one involving heavy toking) include a "bottomless" pool party at a high-roller's Miami mansion, Southern hospitality courtesy of a married brother and sister and their one-eyed inbred offspring, a Ku Klux Klan rally and an insane highway run with White Castle-returnee Neil Patrick Harris, playing himself as a magic-mushroom-fueled, booze-swilling madman on the hunt for whores. Fans of the original will also appreciate a cameo by Goldstein and Rosenberg (David Krumholtz and Eddie Kaye Thomas).
H&K are, as always, at cross purposes on their quest. Harold thinks Colton can use his connections to the White House to clear their names. Kumar, meanwhile, is intent on breaking up Vanessa and the hated Bush acolyte.
The surprise coup de grace -- which, of course, is given away in the trailers -- is an encounter with a chronic-mad President Bush, who favours his joints laced with cocaine. (John Cho says he thinks this movie might actually create a "spike" in Dubya's popularity.)
Nothing matches your first time, but Escape From Guantanamo is still a liberating low humour experience.
(This film is rated 14-A)
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