Film Review

Harold and Kumar Escape From Guantánamo Bay.

by Matt Prigge

At least according to cultural pundits, the fate of Hollywood and its already tenuous relationship with the real world rests on Harold and Kumar Escape From Guantánamo Bay. Yes, it seems we’re a nation of bald hypocrites, chastising La La Land for not addressing serious issues but unwilling to pony up the cash when high-minded fare actually turns up at our local googolplexes.

As you may recall, last fall saw one star-studded, bravely topical film after another open to theaters populated by little more than tumbleweeds. Disregard that most of these were awful, artless exercises in didacticism—in Lions for Lambs ’ case little more than a series of lectures so numbing it would cause the My Dinner With Andre chit-chatters to fall asleep in their entrees.

Surely, execs are but one more box office dud from realizing there’s no money at all in marrying entertainment to post-9/11 musings, and alas, it’s come down to the stoner comedy to turn back the tide. If gobs of American moviegoers aren’t willing to patronize a political satire featuring a “bottomless party” and a threesome with an oversized bag of bud, socially conscious mainstream cinema is truly dead.

Of course this didn’t work out so well the last time, did it? Though it amassed a cult on video and TV, Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle barely made a blip on the summer ’04 box office. The masses apparently weren’t ready for a comedy both sociopolitically astute and hopelessly infantile—a disarming mix of sharp and hilarious cultural observations sharing space with dick and fart jokes that, frankly, worked only in theory. In practice, so dead-on were its best gags that it’s easy to forget that a rather horrifying amount of screentime was devoted to rampaging cheetahs, boil-popping rednecks and Jamie Kennedy.

Escape From Guantánamo Bay serves as a hearty reminder, wasting no time in getting to a seriously non-euphonious case of the runs, with plenty of dick-sucking, sexual humiliation and urination yuks en route. Picking up where its predecessor left off, Guantánamo Bay finds Harold and Kumar (John Cho and Kal Penn) on a plane to Amsterdam when the latter’s smuggled-on invention—a “smokeless bong,” perfect for bathroom tokes­—is mistaken for a bomb. Thanks to the racism of Homeland Security official Rob Corddry—who’s so hissable he at one point literally wipes his ass with the Fifth Amendment—the two are blithely shipped off to Gitmo. But the film’s title comes into play far earlier than expected, and soon Harold and Kumar are trekking through the Deep South, with Corddry on their tail.

Working with more of an agenda this time around, writer/directors Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg go further out of their way to make oft-gut-busting pointers, even capping the film off at Dubya’s Texas ranch house. (It’s perversely refreshing to see Dubya given a relatively sympathetic screen portrayal, though even by the film’s standards it goes too far.) Decidedly less welcome are any and all attempts to “deepen” our befuddled heroes, with Kumar given a long lost love depicted in wholly sincere winsome flashbacks that White Castle, whatever its faults, would never have let happen.

But mostly Guantánamo Bay retains the episodic, goofy-as-hell, smartass-satirical template and, to lesser success, sometimes even the same jokes. This includes Neil Patrick Harris as “himself”—a gag that, sadly, like Johnny Depp in the first Pirates of the Caribbean picture, owes a lot to the element of surprise, despite a Clara’s Heart joke and the ’shroom-induced image of NPH astride a unicorn. But also carrying over is the orginal’s utopian view of a post-race America, where bigots are simply kunckle-scraping morons, albeit in places of power.

Like White Castle, Guantánamo Bay doesn’t “smuggle” lefty politics into mainstream cinema; it assumes its audience is already properly evolved and will laugh along at such acidic cracks as an old white lady visibly horrified at brown people on an airplane or Corddry referring to the Korean-descended Harold as “Hello Kitty.” Unlike the lectures of timely films like In the Valley of Elah and Rendition, Guantánamo Bay—pube jokes and all—treats you like an adult.