Kal Penn and John Cho in Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle Photo © Copyright New Line Cinema

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What You Crave

+ another review by Oliver Wang

Danny Leiner's new film is something like the Bad Boys of gross-out comedies. Like that black-buddies action flick, Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle changes up the race dynamics of an overworked formula, in this case epitomized by Leiner's own Dude, Where's My Car? (2000). And yes, the titular stoners, Korean American Harold (John Cho) and his Indian American roommate Kumar (Kal Penn), lurch through the same sorts of adventures as might befall someone like Ashton Kutcher.

The possibilities for such an image adjustment are, of course, various: the film might draw a new audience to the genre, it might educate the old one, and it might even inspire alternative ways to think about formula per se. The movie has already garnered praise from such venues as the perennially behind-the-times New York Times, but it's not proposing new ideas so much as it's recycling old ones. That is, by making the stoners on the road Asian instead of Caucasian, the movie stops short of questioning the basic premise, namely, it's dopey good fun to watch boys behave badly.

Twenty-two-year-old Harold is an underling investment banker, introduced with his nose to his cubicled grindstone. Looking forward to a relaxing weekend with nothing to do, he's waylaid when his white, self-absorbed boss (conniving to get his own free weekend) assigns him to finish a few spreadsheets. Dutiful drone Harold agrees, a little resentfully, as his boss ta-tas him in the parking lot: "Better luck tomorrow!" With this allusion to Justin Lin's groundbreaking film about overachieving Asian high school students, Harold and Kumar levels a mild challenge to its supposed genre's galumphing assumptions about young American masculinity. That is, for Harold, "luck" is a function of too many political and cultural factors to be anything than overdetermined.

Harold's plan for the evening, however, does change when he gets home to his New York apartment (where a poster of 50 Cent adorns the wall, suggesting his efforts to be cool, his proper consumption patterns, or his hopelessness: you decide). Armed with a bag of fine chronic, Kumar insists they partake, assuring Harold that he'll still make his deadline. (Kumar has his own resentment issues, being a superbright college student determined to sabotage his medical school interviews, so as not to follow in his father's doctorly footsteps.) Encouraged by their equally hazed-out neighbors, Goldstein (David Krumholtz) and Rosenberg (Eddie Kaye Thomas), Harold and Kumar set forth in search of the "perfect food": the cute little burgers at White Castle ("what you crave," according to the tv ad that inspires their quest).

Their journey through the wilds of New Jersey, scripted by Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg, includes predictable encounters of the most ridiculous kind, all underlining just why this film has an R rating rather than the usual PG-13, and all featuring marginalized characters angry at their lots in life. Throughout the film, Harold and Kumar are plagued by the sorts of dudes who might take up the central roles of the more usual version of this comedy, extreme-sports aficionados who announce their ignorance with loud racist epithets. This lends some minor and intermittent urgency to their expedition, as the dudes expediently show up whenever the plot (or rather, the series of episodes) needs a push, for instance, off a cliff.

The boys' several brief acquaintances include a disgruntled Burger Shack employee (Anthony Anderson), who vents his dismay at the fast food industry ("It just makes me want to burn this motherfucker down!"); a group of nerdy Asian college students (whom Kumar calls "the Joy Luck Club" and from whom Harold hopes to score more weed), who admire Harold's banker success, then reveal themselves to be quite capable of busting their own stereotypes, indulging in bawdy excesses at a dorm room party; and a pair of Barbie-dollish college girls who demonstrate frightening control of their taco-induced diarrhea. This horrifies the boys, hiding out in the girls' bathroom like the lascivious players they so want to be as the farty display proceeds.

Repeatedly, as per road-movie formula, Harold and Kumar come to expect sex and/or druggy delirium, only to be disappointed. When their car runs off the road, their savior turns out to be the backwoods-inbred-stereotype mechanic Freakshow (Christopher Meloni), who not only offers his shack for the boys' temporary respite while he repairs the vehicle, but also -- apparently -- his pretty, perky babe of a wife (Kate Kelton). Their tongues hanging out and their breath coming short, the boys are just wondering how to indulge in a threeway without seeming gay, when in clumps Freakshow, his body roiling with boils, eager to join in.

While this possibility sends the boys into a tizzy, their recurring encounters with high and horny hitchhiker Neil Patrick Harris (as "himself") are almost more unnerving. Like most such cameos (onetime beloved tv stars now in search of employment), this one tries desperately to reverse the previous wholesome image, as if this very idea is hilarious (and even though it's been done a million times). Doogie's snotty narcissism (riding in the backseat, he announces, "I'm fuckin' bored as shit back here!") and tedious obsession with big-breasted porn stars ("Let's get some pussy!") soon make the boys' gushing over his enough-already celebrity look aptly inane. (At the same time, you might be inclined to feel some sympathy for Harris, stuck trying to break out of a role he played 15 years ago.)

Harris' primary narrative function appears to be stealing the boys' car, such that they are desperate for transportation, and so take a ride on an "escaped cheetah" (in a fantastical plot turn that might be an odd homage to Bringing Up Baby, and might be just a hallucination). The ride (or maybe the classic romantic comedy reference) alludes to the boys' own slippery sexualities, as young movie-style potheads recurrently tend to be in search of their proper objects of desire. Harold and Kumar settles this question in the usual fashion, by granting Harold a crush on his cardboard cutout of a beautiful neighbor Maria (Paula Garcés), who conveniently likes him back, thus insuring the buddies' heterosexuality. (For his part, Kumar appears to be in love with the perfect bag of fragrant marijuana, as suggested by yet another peculiar dreamlike sequence.)

For all its focus on the usual stoner-boy escapades, Harold and Kumar includes a couple of moments targeting racism qua racism: a cop arrests Harold (for jaywalking) and locks him up. When asked what he's "in for," his cellmate Tarik (Gary Anthony Williams) explains, "for being black," a potentially decent laugh line that leads nowhere (the fact that he's reading Essays in Civil Disobedience alludes to the historical background of this routine). Following, the cops are so preoccupied with delivering a beatdown to Tariq that Harold and Kumar escape from jail, feeling fortunate to have the chance afforded by the victim's very "blackness."

The moment raises a couple of jokes about ignorance and irresponsibility, having to do with the cops' enthusiastic racism and the buddies' less enthusiastic exploitation of it. The moment also raises the question of audience: to whom does it appeal and for whom is the humor meaningful. Even allowing that, sometimes, a joke is just that, the scene might also make you wonder what it means to "progress."