Harold and Kumar add their brand of comedy to Christmas
Stoner duo Harold (John Cho) and Kumar (Kal Penn) have delivered many laughs in their adventures for burgers at White Castle and their unexpected trip to Guantanamo Bay.
In their third outing, they are decking the halls with “bongs” and holly and find themselves in numerous “what the fa-la-la-la-la is going on” moments.
The third installment of Harold and Kumar adventures is actually an improvement when compared to “Guantanamo Bay,” with the writers dropping the politics and returning to the absurdist stoner ridiculousness that made the first film a hit. It also presents these characters as more defined in a story about how these two reconnect with each other and rediscover themselves.
Years after their escape from Guantanamo Bay, Harold and Kumar haven’t spoken to each other since Harold married his love interest from the previous films, Maria (Paula Garces), and gained a respectable 9-to-5 Wall Street job while dodging protesters.
Kumar is still a lovable slacker who doesn’t like to leave his apartment because he wants to smoke more weed. However, his world of underachieving goes upside down when his ex-girlfriend Vanessa (Danneel Harris) shows up and tells Kumar that she is pregnant.
Maria’s family comes to visit, including her Christmas-crazy father (Danny Trejo). Harold tries his best to impress him, but ultimately fails every time since his father-in-law’s mother was killed by Koreans (this movie makes many racist references toward a couple of races).
A reunion between Harold and Kumar occurs after a mysterious package arrives for Harold at Kumar’s apartment. The package turns to be a pickle-sized joint that Kumar lights and accidently burns down the father-in-law’s Christmas tree. To find a replacement, the two once again throw themselves into a series of misadventures.
This movie is packed with many moments that will make audiences cringe as they laugh and just cringe at other times.
The humor in the third installment is even more over-the-top, with a slightly creepy running gag about a baby that gets hopped up on marijuana, cocaine and ecstasy. It’s racist, anti-Semitic and every other kind of offensive, making fun at everything under the sun — Jewish people, Indians, African Americans, nuns, children, Mexicans and even Jesus Christ.
There are even winks-and-nods during the course of the film toward the career moves that Cho and Penn have made.
After the success of the first two films, Cho went on to big blockbuster films with his re-interpretation of Sulu in “Star Trek” and Penn joined the Obama administration after his character on “House” was killed off.
Director Todd Strauss-Schulson pays homage to many classic Christmas films, most notably the Claymation Christmas films that children love.
There’s a Claymation sequence where Harold and Kumar share a hallucinatory vision of being claymated and chased by a giant, angry snowman. There’s also an X-rated reference to the scene in “A Christmas Story” where the child gets his tongue stuck on the pole.
One of the best things about this “Harold and Kumar” installation is how the 3-D doesn’t serve as a source of frustration like many other 3-D films.
The movie both embraces the 3-D and has fun with it in a very vulgar way. It actually makes exceptional use of the technology while also ridiculing the technology itself, tossing smoke rings, eggs, ping pong balls, traffic cones and even a Claymation penis at the audience.
Most of the actors in the supporting cast, with the possible exception of Danny Trejo, are fine, but it’s Neil Patrick Harris that steals the show in his self-deprecating portrayal of a more coarsened, wilder version of himself.
“A Very Harold and Kumar Christmas” is basically just another hit-and-miss. It’s easy to see why it will be called the worst film of the year by some people, but it gives audiences exactly what they paid to see. The movie features a lot of raunchiness and absurdity while also spreading some early holiday cheer.