Review: Harold and Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay (2008)

[Jerry Saravia]

HAROLD AND KUMAR ESCAPE FROM GUANTANAMO BAY (2008)
Reviewed by Jerry Saravia
RATING: Two stars

The first "Harold and Kumar" movie was admittedly a guilty pleasure
but it was also unexpectedly funny and had two likable characters - a
sort of latter-day Cheech and Chong with an even stronger stoner
mentality. This new "Harold and Kumar" movie is not as charming and
hardly as funny, emphasizing gross gags of the most puerile kind over
any sort of intimacy the first film had.

I know, I know, you might be shaking your head and saying, "Intimacy?"
Yes, well, the first movie was a roller-coaster ride full of belly
laughs along the way yet it also asked us to care about Harold (John
Cho) and Kumar (Kal Penn) and their misadventures. In "Escape From
Guantanamo Bay," the Mary Jane duo are mistaken for terrorists in an
airplane headed to Amsterdam, thanks to an advanced glass bong that
Kumar brought along and tries to smoke in the bathroom! So we get a
few scenes in Guantanamo Bay where they are interrogated and forced to
submit to oral sex with the burly prison guards (some of this elicits
more of a wince than a chuckle). Eventually, within the first twenty
minutes, Harold and Kumar manage to escape good old torturous Gitmo
and head for Texas where Kumar's ex-girlfriend is marrying a right-
wing yuppie, who believes in snorting Xanax (okay, that is funny.) Not
so humorous is a KKK rally headed by Christopher Meloni as the wizard,
and a decidedly unfunny homage to "The Goonies" with a one-eyed
bastard child that lives in the basement of a deer hunter's house.
And, I might add, that a deer-killing scene made me cringe - it
would've been funnier if the hunter missed and the bullet hit a tree
that collapsed and nearly crushed the doe's nuts. Well, maybe not but
that is the kind of humor I expected. Seeing blood splatter on
Harold's face is very, very cringe-inducing.

That is the central problem with this Harold and Kumar entry - it made
me cringe more often than laugh. There are bodily fluids, flatulence
sounds galore, male and female frontal nudity from the waist down,
lots of bong hits (though not as many as I expected), sexual escapades
of all sorts, an unwatchable brothel sequence with Neil Patrick Harris
as Neil Patrick Harris and Beverly D'Angelo as the madam, and on and
on.

To be fair, I enjoyed the racial stereotyping scenes - they were all
smart and clever, particularly the airport sequence which is as
hysterical as anything else in the entire movie. I also liked Kumar's
past reminiscences of his ex-girlfriend, Vanessa (Daneel Harris), who
introduced Kumar to drugs in the first place! Had the film focused
more on that relationship and less on the unevenly paced trip to Texas
(including a literal bumping in with George W. Bush), the movie might
have been a real winner.

"Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay" is not a total washout
and it is not a bad stoner comedy. It does have its heart in the right
place occasionally with respect to the lead characters - they are too
likable to dismiss. But the movie scores more misses than bong hits to
the belly. Let's say that the right herbal ingredients were not used
this time.

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