Orange alert

Harold (John Cho, left) and Kumar (Kal Penn) get sent to America's most notorious prison in Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay. (Jaimie Trueblood/New Line Cinema/Alliance Atlantis)

America, for Americans Harold Lee (John Cho) and Kumar Patel (Kal Penn), is a land of equal-opportunity idiocy. In their first film, 2004’s Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle, the mismatched buddies (in this odd couple, slovenly Kumar is Oscar; sphincter-clenched Harold is Felix) were on a pot-induced quest to chow down at the eponymous fast-food restaurant. They had a hankering for those little square burgers known as “sliders” — as in “slides” down the throat, though the phrase, probably correctly, suggests any number of orifices.

The film’s cleverness — “genius” would be a stretch, though legions of fans may disagree — lay first and foremost in the way director Danny Leiner shamelessly revitalized the long-dormant genre of the drug film. For cheap, guttural laughs (sometimes the best kind), he dusted off the old standbys: boob jokes, evil cops and a picaresque journey through a world populated by freaks and outsiders, including Neil Patrick Harris, a.k.a. Doogie Howser.

But because of the casting, the film operated on another, more meaningful level, too, as a meta-text on race in America that appealed to those not generally prone to cheer a collegiate version of Cheech and Chong. Harold and Kumar, brainy with books but dumb with ladies and the law, are so many generations American that their difference is moot to them, yet it seems to matter a great deal to a number of morons they encounter on their journey. White Castle wasn’t exactly social commentary on a Spike Lee scale, but when an intensely stoned Indian-American and a kite-high Korean-American can flush out the prejudice of the so-called post-racial world not by preaching, but just by getting a burger and observing a female-defecation contest — well, maybe that’s something like progress.

In Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay, the racial commentary moves to the forefront, though it’s hard to say if it’s the only reason the sequel is such an inferior joyride. The first instalment was helmed with a kind of mischievous élan by Leiner, a TV director whose only other memorable — and not in a good way — feature is Dude, Where’s My Car? Screenwriters Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg took over the direction this time, and they lack the spryness needed to animate these jokes. The film is funnier in theory than it is in reality.

Harold and Kumar rile Homeland Security agent Ron Fox (Rob Corddry, standing) hot under the collar. (Jaimie Trueblood/New Line Cinema/Alliance Atlantis)

Harold and Kumar are en route to Amsterdam, for obvious reasons, and also because Harold is still trying to track down that pretty girl from the first film. At the airport, Kumar gets stopped for a “random” security check, which sets him off on a racial profiling tirade. The security checker is incredulous, pointing out that he himself is black. Kumar glances at the man’s light skin and scoffs: “Compared to me, you look like Matthew Perry.”

So maybe today’s multiculturalism isn’t exactly the Hands-Across-America-rainbow-coloured-group-hug brand. Mostly — and this is probably the most radical thing about these films, only because it’s so obvious that it’s rarely stated — multiculturalism is casual and fine and uncommented upon. But sometimes it’s abrasive, and occasionally explosive. In the airplane bathroom, Kumar breaks out the “smokeless bong,” a bomb-like contraption in the eyes of an old white woman peering through the door crack. She sees a brown-guy terrorist where we see Kumar, and screams, the bong breaks and it’s post-9/11, plane-grounding chaos.

The two dudes end up in interrogation under the imbecilic gaze of Ron Fox, a Homeland Security cowboy played by The Daily Show’s Rob Corddry. “North Korea and al-Qaeda, together at last,” he says gleefully, shipping them off to Guantanamo. (Here’s where satire trumps drama: the little reminder that innocent people can be “disappeared” in the U.S. these days hits much harder in Harold and Kumar than in the sanctimonious Rendition.)

Guantanamo itself is one of the film’s many missed opportunities. The script dances around the Abu Ghraib jokes waiting to be told, and goes instead for a litany of generic homophobic prison-sex gags. When the boys escape, they get help from the kind of people who live on the other side of the glass looking at an ideal America: Cubans on rafts and inbred Arkansas hunters. (Though few stereotypes prove true; the Arkansas inbreds have a shack that on the inside resembles a minimalist boutique hotel.) Firmly on the right side of privilege is Kumar’s ex-girlfriend Vanessa (Danneel Harris), who is about to marry a bleached-toothed man-hunk (Eric Winter) whose father has ties to George W. Bush. Since they’re already running from the law, Kumar — his affection and irritation equally aroused — decides they should run towards Texas and stop the wedding.

Harold and Kumar and friends. (Jaimie Trueblood/New Line Cinema/Alliance Atlantis)

The film follows the extreme comedy tradition that has waned in popularity lately; most audiences have exchanged the flatulence of the Farrelly Brothers for the gentler triumphs of Judd Apatow. Some of the toilet jokes in the new Harold and Kumar are dated, but it is kind of nice to see a comedy that isn’t about slacker guys slouching towards maturity. Instead, juvenilia reins, as when Neil Patrick Harris reappears, so high on substances that he attempts to brand the behind of a hooker. (No, didn’t do much for me either, but there’s another sequence with a unicorn that is actually hilarious.) The biggest sight gag is a “bottomless” party, as in what happens when the “topless” party becomes passé. Intentionally or not, the joke is actually about the different grooming expectations that face the sexes; the female guests’ shorn and sculpted nether-regions are a sad/sick/funny contrast with the gleaming, flaxen, waxen policy of the hirsute male host.

That kind of “huh” moment is more common in the sequel than the big laughs of the first Harold and Kumar. Last time, a racist cop stood in for the kind of daily prejudice faced by people who look like our half-baked heroes; this time, the boys end up at a KKK rally. Maybe the world is crueler now, but the joke is older. Hurwitz and Schlossberg go for the high-concept abstract joke, but those aren’t always the funny ones. When a George Bush impersonator smokes a bowl, it’s the idea that’s hilarious, not the moment.

Much better is Corddry’s unforgiving portrait of governmental hubris and paranoia. He’s a civil liberties-violating jerk-off, and all for the sake of some twisted version of America. But who’s living a more ideal American life than Harold and Kumar? Surely they’ll return for one last journey, ever in pursuit of life, liberty and the perfect high.

Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay opens April 25.

Katrina Onstad is the film columnist for CBCNews.ca.

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