One of the things I love about Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle is the way it treats its two stars, John Cho (as Harold, or “Rold”) and Kal Penn (as Kumar). The plot could have been played with any hot young dudes in Hollywood in the roles – you’d maybe expect two white guys, one with blonde hair, one with brown – but instead the characters are a Korean-American and an Indian-American. And it isn’t a big deal. Aside from a few derogatory, stereotypical comments made by unfavorable guys the duo meets on their adventure to find a White Castle, race isn’t an issue and doesn’t really come into play story wise.
However, the sequel, Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay, turns the color of their skin into the impetus of the story, which revolves around them being mistaken for terrorists (“North Korea and Al-Qaeda working together”). Almost disguised as a smarter, more politically satirical follow-up, Guantanamo Bay, which was directed by Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg, who wrote this movie and the original, is basically just an adaptation of a Truly Tasteless Jokes book — if every other page of that book were annotated with updates, apologies, corrections and clarifications. It’s a movie that wants to have its offensively stereotypical cake and eat it, too – using a kind of utensil we’re not accustomed to seeing used for such a meal. What I mean is that each joke is a play on a socially recognized stereotype. Easily stereotyped characters are set up as clichés (dumb white-trash hick from Alabama) only to be revealed as the opposite (he has a classy home with refined interior decorating and accoutrements), yet ultimately they’re also exposed as being a part of that stereotype (he’s married to his sister and they have an inbred cyclops child in the basement).
It’s mostly a one kind of joke movie, which is almost worse than a one-joke movie. Every few minutes Harold and Kumar, who have escaped from the Guantanamo Bay detention center and are now on the run from Homeland Security, run into some such situation where the expected, stereotype-based punchline is flipped around but then flipped back, so laughs come from both what is familiar and what is the reverse of that familiarity. But after awhile, the laughs don’t come as much, because the audience starts to see both the flip and the flip-back before they happen. The jokes become extremely predictable, and while they’re independently humorous, particularly in concept, their execution, because of their context in the movie, is dead on arrival.
Yes, Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanmo Bay is pretty funny anyway, mainly because there are a few other kinds of singular and continuous jokes, from raunchy visual and verbal gags to broad parody and satire, but it’s not consistently so. And its choice of certain conventions, such as the very tired, obligatory inclusion of a Ku Klux Klan rally (the flip: they actually throw a good party; the flip-back: they are still racists) and the subplot about Kumar’s ex-girlfriend getting married to your typical “douche” romantic-comedy antagonist (the flip: he’s really a good guy; the flip-back: no, he’s actually a “douche”) is disappointing.
Finally, what really saves the movie from sinking into conventional and stereotypical quicksand is the performances (and for the guys: lots of topless and bottomless nudity). Cho and Penn are again a delightful duo, and I’ll watch as many Harold & Kumar movies just to see the actors working together — and working in general (seeing Cho relegated to a bit part in the recent small film The Air I Breathe and Penn playing an actual terrorist on 24 is unfortunate for such terrific, yet unconventional actors). Neil Patrick Harris is again hilarious as “Neil Patrick Harris” (that is his credited role, with the quotation marks, not “as himself”), this time accompanied by Starship Troopers reference, which is definitely funnier than Doogie Howser reference. The best part, however, is certainly Rob Corddry, who plays the ignorant Homeland Security agent pursuing the boys. He explodes all over each scene he’s in, as he turns his perfectly suitable, thinly developed bad guy into a hammy masterpiece of a character. Of course, he also represents some of the faults of the movie. He may be a villain because of his ignorant racism and stereotyping, but the movie as a whole seems guiltier for having awareness and yet playing race and stereotype for laughs anyway.
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