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Neil Patrick Harris
John Cho
Kal Penn
Harold & Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay
(2008)
Right from its faux-important cursive titles, the sequel Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay demonstrates a self-awareness that saves it from the junk heap. With a refreshing lack of pretention, the movie just sets out to give the audience entertaining, borderline-nonsensical fun. It's a latter-day Abbott and Costello flick, where the monster they encounter isn't Frankenstein, but the Bush Administration. That concept alone is enough to give this subversive frat party of a movie a try. As Kumar says early on, "It's going to be just like Eurotrip, only it isn't going to suck."
Certainly, Harold and Kumar fans will enjoy the raunchy absurdities of the sequel, written and directed by Jon Hurwitz & Hayden Schlossberg, the writers of Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle. Picking up just where the first film left off, the sequel finds Harold (John Cho) and Kumar (Kal Penn) setting off for the airport for a trip to Amsterdam. Encounters with airport security (a "random security check") and federal air marshals lead to the confirmed promise of the title, but the underlying complication is actually the airport discovery that Kumar's old flame Vanessa (Danneel Harris) is getting married in a week, to a WASP-y "douche" named Colton (Eric Winter).
While the romantic angle retains the first film's heartfelt "wingman" buddy comedy, the shift from hamburgers to politics gives the sequel just a bit more post-Patriot Act edge. As such, it's outrageous, patriotic fun, the odd couple tangling with Ron Fox (Rob Corddry) of the Department of Homeland Security. With his tendency to go into comic overdrive, Corddry is the perfect choice to play an idiot whose idiocy only gives him more confidence; he, too, has a funny dynamic with an odd-couple foil, Roger Bart's capable, sensible vice-chairman of the NSA. Fox is the poster boy for the Patriot Act. "Oh, I'm sorry, you want rights now" he spews sarcastically. "Where you guys are going, they have never even heard of rights!" Whether exercising his overdramatic penchant for throwing glass items at walls and demanding, "Do you want to rape America?" or blasting "Danger Zone" on his earphones during a plane flight, Corddry hits the spot.
Lest we forget Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay is timed to be released not the week of July 4 but the week of 4/20, so, yes, the drug and sex jokes are also plentiful (don't even ask about the "cock meat sandwich" sequence). Expect as well the return of Neil Patrick Harris, playing his bizarro self: a raging heterosexual egomaniac with substance abuse issues (he likes to drive on 'shrooms, beer, and Jack). Happily, race-relation humor remains a priority for the writers, from Fox's breathless "observation" "North Korea and Al Qaeda working together—this is bigger than I thought" to sequences that bait with black, Jewish, and redneck stereotypes, flinging them around until they lose all credibility while still using them to get a knowing, self-critical laugh from the viewer.
At heart, these films are all about two friends, and Hurwitz and Schlossberg don't neglect their heroes. An engaging flashback section reveals Kumar's one-time habit of writing math-themed love poetry (and Harold's bygone fashions); such passages allow the heights of ridiculousness like plopping the two into a KKK bonfire. Cho and Penn put all the nonsense over with great chemistry and sharp comic timing; though these films are indulgently juvenile, the stars will be remembered as a great comic team.
[For Groucho's interview with John Cho, click here, and for his interview with Kal Penn, click here.]
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