Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay (2008)

May 15, 2008

A brilliant example of a comedy movie (funny and hilarious), Harold Lee (John Cho) and Kumar Patel (Karl Penn) are now en route to Amsterdam, weed capital of the world, where they can indulge in their favourite drug and be high all the time. Secondary objective is of course Harold’s quest to look for Maria and on the way they bump into Vanessa Kumar’s ex-girlfriend who introduced him to the world of marijuana. But with the idiotic duo, what you see in the trailer had to happen, and being accused as agents of North Korea and Al-Qaeda, they get sent to Guantanamo Bay where they soon bust out of.

Like the first movie, we follow these two jokers from incident to incident, each playing like a standalone comedy skit, as they try to evade capture from the Department of Homeland Security, and now with their new quest of looking up Vanessa, so that they can get her influential fiancé to get them off the hook, coupled with Kumar’s own vendetta of disrupting the upcoming wedding proceedings. I was somewhat surprised that this movie had some semblance of a flimsy plot to follow, such that it’s not mindless random episodes all the way.

The jokes come from you at all angles - verbal, slapstick, and sometimes just plain irreverent. And for those who are anal retentive, you’d probably foam at the source material for most of the jokes, ranging from the homophobic to the racist, executed so sublimely, you’d probably feel guilty for laughing out loud at the funny bits. And what’s a movie like this without the usual gratuitous shots of body parts, female and male, with genitalia on display without a tinge of embarrassment. What more, the camera lingers, especially when filmmakers Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg wanted to probably perpetuate their version of a happening bottomless party in your face. Yep, topless is overrated.

But I guess what made this movie click, was that it doesn’t hold back, and dared to slow things down by dipping into melodrama-romantic moments which will raise your goose bumps. Friendship between the two idiots get tested, broken and healed faster than you can smoke a joint, and Love, well, let’s see if the square root of three will make you go “aww”

All in all, Harold and Kumar rocks.