Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle Blu-ray Review
The Road to Munchies.
Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman, February 5, 2011
Road pictures have been a staple of film at least since the halcyon days of Hope and Crosby's famous series. But the approach of thrusting two (or sometimes more) characters, usually completely disparate, together in the close confines of a car or other mode of travel is uniquely calculated to provide potent opportunities for laughs. If the Hope and Crosby films seem at times a little stale to modern eyes, newer road films, including everything from
Plains, Trains and Automobiles to
Midnight Run have proven the genre is alive and kicking. Probably no better example of that is the completely idiosyncratic, and frequently outright hilarious,
Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle, a film which manages to reinvent the road picture in a completely unironic postmodern way that manages to be both fresh, bracing, and completely, utterly and inescapably politically incorrect. In this case our road buddies are impossibly uptight working stiff Harold (John Cho), a Korean American who is a junior analyst at an accounting firm, and his semi-slacker roommate Kumar (Kal Penn), an Indian American who is resisting with whatever slight energy he has his father's ardent wish that he settle down and become a doctor. The fact that
Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle features such an off kilter
pair of heroes, instead of the more typical combo of one relatively sane, one off his or her rocker, duo, is in itself part of the fun of the film. But
Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle trips (in at least a couple of meanings of that term) down an increasingly surreal path that sees the pair's cartoonish antics actually turn into a cartoon by the time the film wends its way to its "awww, gee" happy ending.
As in most road pictures, there's really not a whole lot to
Harold and Kumar's set up or, indeed, its episodic execution. Harold is put upon by office bullies to finish their work while they go out on the prowl, but Kumar convinces his friend to come back to their apartment to get properly "baked" for the weekend. Their excellent adventure with marijuana coincides with an expected case of the munchies and a perhaps fortuitously aired television ad for the hamburger chain White Castle, which of course strikes the two as the most perfect food imaginable. And thus the road trip begins.
Along their sometimes tortured way, Harold and Kumar are beset both by extra-office bullies, a pair of flatulent Princeton beauties, an Asian American girl who has a crush on Harold, an oozing boil covered tow truck operator quite appropriately nicknamed Freakshow, several boorish policemen, an escaped cheetah and, lest we forget, none other than Doogie Howser himself, Neil Patrick Harris, in one of the oddest, funniest cameos in recent memory. This is a film which happily breezes along on one absurd situation after another, all without any winking at the audience, making it twice as funny.
The strength of this admittedly pretty slight film is in the charm of its performances, led by a very winning pair of turns by the stars, Cho and Penn. Evincing two very believable minority characters with very different backgrounds, approaches to life, and types of reactions make this film continually funny even when the writing is not particularly inspired. Often just a raised eyebrow on the part of Kumar, as he can't believe yet another one of Harold's straitlaced idiocies, is enough to provoke giggles. But on more than one occasion, the writing does rise to perhaps unexpected levels of insight. As Harold and Kumar escape in Harold's increasingly bedraggled car, Kumar wants to listen to the radio and begins fiddling with the dial. "Presets, only use the presets!" urges a distraught Harold. "Your whole
life is a preset!" is Kumar's completely apt rejoinder.
A number of very funny supporting turns also aids and abets the stars in their journey to a New Jersey White Castle. The two most notable are a completely unrecognizable Christopher Meloni, buried under several strata of ugly latex, in a completely off the wall portrayal as Freakshow, the
Deliverance-esque tow truck operator who picks the boys up after they crash their car in the woods. Dancing about like an insane electrocuted puppet on a string, Meloni is so absolutely bizarre his segment becomes unforgettable, and not just because Freakshow's wife turns out to be a nubile young woman who, like several others in the film, doesn't mind flashing her breasts at Harold and Kumar. But the cameo department is won hands down by Neil Patrick Harris, playing a stoned version of himself whom the boys pick up when they see him hitchhiking by the side of the road. Harris turns out to be a womanizer (released before the actor came out), higher than kite, and prone to licking the seats of Harold's car and leaving "love stains."
The film delights in one absurd situation after another. Harold is often the brunt of Kumar's boneheaded decisions, and is forced to suffer everything from being arrested on a completely trumped up pretext (along, it turns out, with various other minorities who had the misfortune to pass through this section of New Jersey) to riding "shotgun" (if that's possible) on a faster than light cheetah the boys give a toke or two to and then board as if the animal were a supersonic jet. This segment leads to an over the top animated sequence where Harold hallucinates a brief scenario involving Maria (Paula Garcés), the girl of his dreams who lives down the hall from the boys but whom Harold has always been afraid to chat up. As with the bulk of the film, this segment lasts just barely long enough to get one or two zingers in, and then we're off on yet another breathless section. In fact the film's breakneck pace is one of its best features. Unlike some major fast food chain's "beef" products, there's little if any filler here.
Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle is smart enough to both take its characters seriously within the context of the film, but to never take them so seriously the film seems overarch or intentionally ironic. As scabrous, scatological, sexist and politically incorrect as this film undeniably is, it has a very sweet, almost innocent, heart at its core. It is, in fact, like a stoner's meal at White Castle: not particularly nutritious, but surprisingly delicious.
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