Also critical to the film's success, relative newcomers Cho and Penn displayed a palpable comedic chemistry, with Cho's fussy Harold and Penn's zany Kumar believable best friends who could still drive each other nuts. Racial profiling lands them in Guantanamo Bay, but they manage to escape, travelling across the American South in the hopes of contacting their college buddy whose government connections can clear their name - the same college buddy, ironically, who is about to marry Kumar's old girlfriend and true love (Danneel Harris).īy no means a classic, Harold & Kumar Go To White Castle deserved its cult status thanks to a consistently funny script, written by first-timers Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg, that subverted racial stereotypes by creating an authentic multicultural suburban stoner universe where whites, Jews, Indians, and Koreans endlessly cut each other down with playful back-and-forth barbs. Picking up precisely where White Castle ended, Korean office drone Harold (John Cho) and Indian goof-off Kumar (Kal Penn) are flying to Amsterdam when authorities mistake Kumar's homemade bong for a terrorist's bomb. Ancillaries will best serve this film, however, especially when the inevitable unrated DVD enters the market, although one shudders to think how much more vulgar that cut of the film could possibly be. Interestingly, since White Castle's release, two likeminded buddy sex-comedies have found huge riches: 2005's Wedding Crashers ($209m) and last summer's Superbad ($121m). Considering that White Castle proved to be a strong rental, and that co-star Kal Penn has recently boosted his profile with Superman Returns and Epic Movie, Guantanamo Bay looks set to achieve this goal. Guantanamo Bay will target the non-PC crowd on its US release (April 25), looking to improve on the box office of the low-budget 2004 original ($18m in the US and just over $5.5m internationally). Alas, while not without its funny moments, the laboured Harold & Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay ups the nudity and gross-out factor of the relatively tame original while diminishing the sweetness and evident camaraderie of its appealing leads. 101 mins.Ģ004's Harold & Kumar Go To White Castle was such a pleasant surprise - a witty stoner comedy with some depth and genuine laughs - that it was perhaps too much to hope that the sequel could retain the original's spark.
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