Harold & Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay (2008)

Director: John Hurwitz, Hayden Schlossberg
Starring: John Cho, Kal Penn, Neil Patrick Harris, Rob Corddry

Be sure to also read our interview with John Cho.

Did you see Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle? Did you like it? Then you’ll want to see this film. Written—and this time directed—by the pair that wrote the original, the sequel delivers everything the first film offered—stoner jokes, gross-out laughs, plays to racial stereotypes—that the first offered. Here, everything is, as the kids say, dialed up a notch, so fans with fond memories of the 2004 original will love the sequel. I saw the movie with someone who’d never seen the original, and he enjoyed it, too. You just have to have a taste for jokes about drugs, genitalia and bodily secretions.

The sequel picks up the story of the two dorky post-collegiates less than a week after the first movie ends, with the pair following Maria (the cute girl John Choo’s Harold is hung up on in the original) to Amsterdam. The plans of Choo’s tightly-wound straight man are derailed by the laid-back idiocy of Kal Penn’s Kumar, and, as the title implies, they’re thrown in Guantanamo Bay. The filmmakers have the wisdom to get the pair out of that real-world hellhole as quickly as possible, and the movie becomes another unbelievable travelogue as the pair moves from one outrageous encounter to another, this time with the goal of reaching the one person who might be able to help them clear their names.

The film directly takes on some key aspects of our unpleasant era: The horror that is Guantanamo, the inherent bias, indignity and ineptitude of airport security, and the combination of incompetence, arrogance and malice that seem to personify the federal government. The filmmakers play all this for laughs in a way that mostly works, at least within the confines of such a deliberately outrageous film.

Drawbacks to this would be that playing Homeland Security (personified by “Daily Show” veteran Rob Corddry) as slapstick morons is a little like watching the funny, funny Nazis on “Hogan’s Heroes” (“Hahaha, how’d these guys ever kill six million Jews, anyway? Oh, that Sgt. Shultz …”). Oh, and then there’s the racial stereotyping: Anyone with dark skin is a terrorist … only the movie shows that to be false. Any bunch of black dudes shooting hoops are criminal punks … only the movie shows that to be false. Poor white southerners are inbred trash, and rich white dudes are country-club assholes … which the movie shows to be entirely true. Well, hell, if you find yourself in the “majority,” you can at least have the good grace to have a thick skin. And they’re right on the rich white dudes, so I guess that part’s okay.

Cho and Penn again play really well off each other and their increasingly wacky surroundings, and the film keeps up the momentum of the original, which is a key virtue. The filmmakers this time manufacture a love story for Penn, which provides him something like character development. But really, we’re only seeing these movies for the Porky’s-style T&A and the gross-out humor that would scandalize our parents. This film delivers both, and does it in a more intelligent and entertaining style than a lot of movies in its genre. You could do worse with your ten bucks.