Weekly meditations from your humble messenger
Harold
and Kumar Make a Dull Comedy
(Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay, 5/5/08)
By Nicholas Nicastro
Harold
and Kumar, the pan-Asian stoners last seen heading to White Castle to
cure their munchies, get mistaken for terrorists and get sent to Guantanamo
Bay. The pitch for that script must have gone pretty well—it's
a funny premise. But then there's the little matter of making a movie
out of it.
The idea was actually better than
funny: it was an opportunity to apply a little cleansing humor to some
dirty sores infecting our national consciousness. To America's private
little gulag in Cuba, we can add anti-Moslem paranoia and ethnic profiling,
as well as zeal of some to exploit terror as an excuse to pursue their
own political agendas. Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg, the pair
responsible for Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle (2004),
had their choice of victims for the sequel. But like nervous shooters
facing too many fat targets, they ended up missing pretty much all of
them.
Things start off entertaining enough.
Harold (John Cho) and Kumar (Kal Penn) board a plane for Europe, and
get more than their share of TSA scrutiny. The lads elicit not a few
suspicious glances on board, with one woman seeing Kumar as a turbaned,
cackling Taliban. That's before Kumar, true to form, gets caught in
the restroom assembling what he calls a bong, but what everyone
else hears as another four-letter word that starts with "b".
From those few opening laughs things
go flat. The real problem is that Hurwitz and Schlossberg are either
too frightened or too aloof to really dig into the satire. They're not
above wanking jokes, or showing bottomless babes with their "racing
stripes," but shy away from showing us the prison at Guantanamo.
Instead of satirizing America's fear and loathing of a large segment
of the world's people, we get Harold and Kumar on the run through the
U.S. south, facing the usual gallery of crackers and Klansmen. Even
then, the satire is strangely hedged ("I never though I'd say it,"
declares Harold, "but the Klan really knows how to party!").
The movie becomes less about America's skewed view of the world than
Hollywood's hackneyed view of America.
Rob Corddry, formerly of The
Daily Show, hams it up as an overzealous agent of Homeland Security.
He gets no yuks, though. Where Homeland Security has become a bigger
national joke than FEMA, the writers play it safe again, balancing crazy
Corddry against cooler (and equally unfunny) heads. Oddly, the movie
even seems reticent to stick it to George Bush. Where many Americans
voted for him in 2000 because they preferred to have a beer with him,
here we get young George as a cool guy, happy to party with other controlled
substances. Why and how Doogie Howser's Neil Patrick Harris figures
into all this, playing himself as a peyote-popping whore-hound, is more
puzzling than funny.
True, it's hard to imagine making
something amusing out of Harold and Kumar shoved in the dirt, forced
to wear black hoods, or having electrodes attached to their testicles.
Getting laughs out of the "simulated drowning" of our favorite
potheads would have been a challenge. Then again, isn't that why Hurwitz
and Schlossberg were paid big money for the sequel? For the common good,
maybe they should have forgotten about Doogie Howser, and earned their
checks .
©2008 Nicholas Nicastro
back to Culture Blog