- guardian.co.uk, Monday March 10 2008 12.53 GMT
Dope movie ... Harold & Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay
Stoner comedies are rarely treated with the same respect as dramas, documentaries, animation, or pretty much any other genre, but this one deserves to be. If you were to judge movies solely on audience reaction, this was an 11 out of 10.
Admittedly spirits were high (metaphorically - Austin isn't that liberal), but this was one of the most raucous screenings I've ever attended. Even the opening credits were wildly applauded, and much of the dialogue was inaudible over the laughter. That's not to be underestimated. A multitude of American film-makers have tried, and failed, to engage with the whole War On Terror era, but Harold and Kumar allows audiences to laugh at it for the first time - it felt like a cathartic sigh of relief at the coming end of the Bush presidency.
The story, of course, is total nonsense. For those who missed this film's predecessor, Harold and Kumar are respectively a Korean-American (John Cho) and an Indian-American (Kal Penn). Despite an all-American penchant for marijuana, their ethnicity continuously counts against them. A mishap with a "smokeless bong" on their flight to Amsterdam leads to their branding as terrorists, and an orange-jumpsuited spell in Guantanamo Bay.
It's a red herring, really - they escape within half an hour, and proceed to stumble through an American landscape of ethnic stereotypes, all of which are both subverted and re-affirmed (the Alabama rednecks' shack, for example, has a tasteful, yuppie-standard interior, but they still keep an inbred, one-eyed son in the basement).
In hot pursuit of these fugitives is a determined but culturally clueless Homeland Security agent (Rob Corddry) who sums up everything that's wrong in These Troubled Times - at one point he literally wipes his ass with the fifth amendment. The movie has its blind spots - it's rather homophobic, and for every clever gag there's a base one - but it finds comedy in a subject that isn't at all funny. Which is funny.
