I'm Going To Gitmo, Sucka!

Who would have imagined that a movie which begins with its heroes getting racially profiled at an airport, tossed into prison at Guantánamo Bay, threatened with rape at gunpoint by American soldiers (a practice that is depicted as so routine there’s even a slang term for it), and questioned by a Homeland Security officer who literally wipes his ass with the Bill of Rights, would also turn out to contain the most sympathetic portrayal of George W. Bush of any film in the last eight years?

Welcome to the topsy-turvy politics of Harold & Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay, a sequel to 2004’s stoner cult movie Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle. It’s four years later, but the action in this film picks up right where the previous one left off, with the marijuana smoke barely even given time to dissipate. Korean-American Harold (John Cho) has decided to travel to Amsterdam in hopes of hooking up with Maria (Paula Garcés), the pretty neighbour he finally worked up the nerve to kiss at the end of the first movie, before some hypothetical good-looking Dutchman can waltz in and steal her affections; for Indian-American Kumar (Kal Penn), the prospect of legal weed is enough to make him want to tag along. But when a fellow passenger mistakes the sinister-looking “smokeless bong” Kumar has sneaked onto the plane for a bomb, it’s off to Gitmo for our luckless heroes.

As the title implies, they’re not in there for long: federal prison is merely the first stop in a long, surreal journey that stretches from Cuba to the room in George Bush’s ranch where he goes to put his feet up, smoke a little weed, and hide out from Dick Cheney. (“That guy scares the shit out of me,” he mutters guiltily.) The climactic scene, in which Bush shares some of his stash with Harold and Kumar, fugitives from his own government, is the movie’s comic masterstroke: like Kumar, Dubya is just an easygoing underachiever sick of having done everything in his life just to make his dad happy. When Harold tells Bush that he’s not sure he trusts his government anymore after everything that’s happened to him, Bush gets the most sensible line in the entire movie: “Hell, I don’t trust the government!” he says. “You don’t have to trust your government to be a patriot. You just have to trust your country.”

Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg, who wrote and directed the film, trust their country too. They realize that it’s filled with plenty of right-wing douchebags and racist seniors and inbred Klansmen—and of course, there’s always that drugged-up sex maniac Neil Patrick Harris to watch out for—but the map is also dotted with helpful way stations where Harold and Kumar can be sure to find all the food, clothing, and naked women they need. Hayden and Schlossberg love to upend cultural clichés—in fact, their main comic strategy is to introduce a racial or regional stereotype and then leave you guessing whether it will turn out to hold true. A scary, muscular black man turns out to be an orthodontist, the shack of a deer-hunting redneck turns out to look like a Manhattan penthouse inside, and that Republican bride-to-be turns out to be a pot-smoking superfreak at heart.

For all its raunchy humour (which is often more off-putting than funny) and all the unnecessary reprises of gags from the first movie (including a return visit from the Giant Bag of Weed), Harold & Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay is an unusually inclusive movie. In this contentious election season, it’s maybe the only comedy you can imagine Barack Obama and George W. Bush laughing at together.