Starring: John Cho, Kal Penn
Directors: John Hurwitz, Hayden Schlossberg
2008
Kingsgate Films
Harold and Kumar: Escape from Guantanamo Bay is not Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle. It is not as funny, it is not as well written and it is not nearly as entertaining. On a fundamental level Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay is a lazy movie. It is so lazy that even the gratuitous nudity is boring – it takes a lot to make beautiful bottomless women boring but this movie manage to accomplish just that.
Once you have managed to make even the pornographic boring to the puerile mind (it is frequently boring to other minds) you don’t have many other places to go. If there are saving graces to this edition of Harold and Kumar it is the return of John Cho and Kal Penn (Dr. Lawrence Kutner on House) as the altered states seeking Harold Lee and Kumar Patel. In their own right Cho and Penn are talented performers and deliver their characters with practiced ease and make the best of a suspect script. The script was produced by Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg “gifted talents” that show all the behind the camera talent of Ed Wood with a bad hangover.
Here it is in a nutshell: Harold and Kumar decide to get on a plane, Kumar gets them arrested as terrorist, they are shipped off to Guantanamo Bay and escape shortly there after. Now it is a chase movie with the world’s most incompetent agency (Department of Homeland Security) chasing two stoners across the U.S. south which gives the writers opportunity to make obvious jokes about the Klan, inbreeding, hunting and law enforcement in general. One last saving grace: Neil Patrick Harris. NPH is almost worth the price of admission as he reprises his drug, liquor and whoring self in this movie. NPH’s addition to the movie was a welcome respite from a mostly dull script but it really felt like someone had lifted it from the previous movie and dropped it in as filler. All in all Harold and Kumar: Escape from Guantanamo Bay is a pass.