Reviewed by Lamar Kukuk
6/5/08
Political satire can be a
dicey business because there's nothing more irritating than having somebody
lecture you about what you already believe for two hours. As such,
sometimes it helps to be really dumb if you want to be really smart, and
believe me, the new sequel Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo
Bay is REALLY dumb. It's also the movie Borat
so desperately wished it was. Using outrageously tasteless and raunchy
humor, writer-directors Jon Hurwitz & Hayden Schlossberg deliver a
cinematic State of the Union about a country divided by racial stereotypes
in which all of us, even a couple of stoner dudes and the President of
the United States, have a lot more in common than we think. Despite
the episodic format built into any road trip movie, it's unusually structurally
sound for any comedy, but unbelievably so for one built on gross-outs and
pot jokes.
Picking up where Harold
& Kumar Go To White Castle left off, pals Harold Lee (John Cho)
and Kumar Patel (Kal Penn) are taking a flight to Amsterdam in pursuit
of Harold's dream girl Maria (Paula Garces). At the airport, they
bump into Kumar's One That Got Away, Vanessa (Danneel Harris), who's engaged
to Colton Graham (Eric Winter), a wealthy Texan whose father works for
the President. On the plane, he gets back to business, sneaking into
the bathroom with Harold to demonstrate his invention: the smokeless
bong. But turbulence sends him stumbling out of the bathroom with
the device in hand and a paranoid old woman screams “Terrorist!”
It doesn't help that Kumar's left to insist “Don't worry! It's a
bong!” and soon both he and Harold are in federal custody. The Homeland
Security Agent in charge of these matters is off ice fishing, which leaves
them at the mercy of Ron Fox (Rob Corddry), a flaming imbecile who was
inspired to get into his profession by the movie Starship Troopers.
He concludes there's only one place for evildoers like them: Guantanamo
Bay! Luckily, their cell is next to some real terrorists who try
unsuccessfully to bust out, opening the door for Harold and Kumar to make
it over the wall. Soon enough, they've gotten back to the US with
the help of Cuban refugees, but Fox is in hot pursuit. Harold hatches
a plan to travel to Texas and get Colton to intervene, but when Kumar agrees,
he's really just looking to bust up that wedding. Along the way,
they meet Americans of every walk of life, but if they're going to make
it to a fateful meeting with George W. Bush himself (James Adomian), they're
gonna need a lift from their old pal, Neil Patrick Harris.
I've never seen White
Castle, but it shoots right to the top of my Netflix cue on the basis
of Guantanamo Bay, as hilariously smart as a comedy where a sitcom
star chases hookers with a branding iron is ever likely to be. Harold
& Kumar love their pot, but they're actually pretty smart guys, and
the movie does a great job of making their cross-country crime spree feel
like guilt-free heroism. A lot of that is thanks to the great jobs
Corddry and Winter do in embodying establishment villains who represent
the dark side of the country's conservative leadership. Rick Fox
pursues Homeland Security with the xenophobic single-mindedness that makes
the world think Americans are racist idiots, while Colton Graham looks
to snuff out all of his fiancee's individuality in the name of morality
he doesn't really practice (he'd never smoke pot, preferring to snort Xanax).
It helps a lot that Penn and Harris strike real sparks, and she seems more
alive when she's around him: this is the very rare movie where the
hero's attempt to stop the girl of his dreams from marrying another guy
is at least as much of a favor to her as it is to him. And there's
a wonderful bit of business revolving around a poem Kumar wrote in college
(credit to poet David Feinberg who actually wrote it) that makes the wedding
climax amazingly moving for this sort of movie.
The movie's got an interesting
thesis in that it stops short of saying stereotypes have no basis:
yes, it says, they're part of who we are, but focusing on them keeps us
from seeing the whole picture. Hurwitz and Schlossburg mix up the
pattern really well, opening some scenes with the stereotype only to reveal
it to be false (the scary-looking street basketball players who stalk the
fleeing guys with crowbars because they wanted to help them fix their car),
and others with the contradiction only to reveal the stereotype lurking
beneath it (the charming Southern couple who take the guys in and turn
out to be brother and sister with a cyclops baby). What they're getting
at is the prickly truth of our multicultural society. We're not all
“the same”, but we are all “alike”. The lesson goes double for the
War on Terror, seen here to be run by loons who're so blinded by ethnicity
they don't even realize that Harold's parents speak English, not Korean.
The distinction between the guys and the real terrorists occupying the
cell next to them couldn't be clearer, but what's going on at the movie's
Guantanamo has very little to do with fighting terrorism and a whole lot
to do with that strange undercurrent of repressed homosexuality that keeps
bubbling up amongst the government's moral crusaders. Adomian makes
a living impersonating the President, and while he doesn't really look
like him, he's got the voice and gestures down to a creepy level, and the
Bush we get is both hilariously vile and interestingly complex. There's
no question he's a hypocrite, but there's something to be said for what
he tells the guys when they call him on it (not that I could quote it here).
None of which is to say that
those uninterested in politics and social issues can't just sit back and
laugh at the crazy goings-on: Harold & Kumar is VERY funny!
Never more so than when Harris is on-screen, not just lampooning his squeaky-clean
image, but burning it to the ground unlike anyone I've ever seen before.
Stoned on mushrooms, crazed for hookers, and pretty sure he actually performed
all that Doogie Howser surgery all those years ago, he's a tornado
of politically incorrect psychosis (the contents of his duffel bag would
give police probable cause for just about anything they wanted to charge
him with). Oh, and NPH fans MUST stay for the end credits:
there's a nice little tag after they're done. Harold and Kumar themselves
make a great comic team: Penn's a skilled goofball and Cho's slow
burn makes him a perfect straightman. The friendship that's stretched
almost to the breaking point by their adventure feels real, and the movie
earns the over-the-top good cheer that closes it out. Like most of
the best gross-out comedies, it's got a heart of gold to go with its' assortment
of bodily fluids.
I love saying things like
this: Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay is one
of the best movies of the year to date. It's clever and dumb in just
the right ratio and is actually the best of the last year's round of movies
about the War on Terror. Certainly when future generations want to
get a sense of where we were as a country in the spring of 2008, I'll be
hard-pressed to give them a better movie recommendation. |
