Film Review: Harold & Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay

April 29, 2008 by Lord Jason  Send to a Friend

(note: this isn’t number 1 with a bullet, that’s Baby Mama, and will come tomorrow.)

Harold & Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay

Stems and seeds.

Remember all those times in high school or college when you smoked a lot of herb and hung out with that one dude who always wanted to talk about what was going on in the geo-political landscape? Didn’t you want to punch that dude in the face, tell him to shut the fuck up and pass the goddam joint, already? I mean I’m trying to play MarioKart Wii, and some dude with a scruffy amish beard, a stinky Che Guevara shirt, and one of those giant retarded keffiyah scarves is trying to tell me about how fucked up the US government is in between taking gigantic bong hits and searching YouTube for videos of dudes getting hit in the nuts. Well, that’s what watching Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay was like. I just wanted them to shut the fuck up and make with the funny.

H&K picks up where the first film left off. Harold(John Cho) and Kumar(Kal Penn) are getting ready to head off to Amsterdam in order to chase after Harold’s love interest, Maria. It also starts off with a gigantic diarrhea joke. This was funny when they did it in Dumb & Dumber, because of the situation in which it occurs. People need to know that shit isn’t funny just because it’s shit. And the scatological humor that pervades this movie is exactly like that. It’s like walking down the street and laughing because you see a dog turd on the sidewalk. If you are laughing at the mere presence of poop, there is something seriously wrong with you. Or you are high.

Continuing on with the film, H&K get on the plane to Amsterdam and inevitably meet in the bathroom in order to smoke weed out of an elaborate bong. This I can believe. I cannot, however, believe that Kumar, no matter how stoned, would just step out in the middle of the plane and say to people, “Don’t worry, this is just a bong.” Air marshals hear “bong” as “bomb”, and they wind up headed straight to Guantanamo Bay.

What follows is pretty much the same as the first film. They have to reach an old college buddy in Texas in order to clear their name, which is WAY more serious than the first film in which they were trying to get to a fast food restaurant because they had the munchies. They are being chased by a seemingly retarded racist government agent(Rob Corddry) who believes every stereotype about every minority, and that they are all terrorists. Along the way they run into various ethnic groups, most of which are played as the opposite of what you think they should be. AH-HA! The big menacing black guy with a crowbar is an orthodontist, the redneck hunter has an art deco decorated cabin, and so-on and so-forth.

Ultimately, all of the issues about race, the war on terror, and the current state of the government just made me feel uneasy and uncomfortable, mostly because it wasn’t very funny at all. Movies about weed work better when you aren’t trying to make a statement bigger than, “let’s get more weed and buy some hamburgers”. Imagine Rendition if it starred Cheech & Chong. Waterboarding isn’t funny, even if you are using bong-water.

My Reaction: Suck (2 out of 5)

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