A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas – review

Warner Bros has cannily entered two horses in the Christmas box-office stakes this year, both set in New York but each aimed at a different audience demographic: the inoffensively tasteful New Year's Eve, and this outrageously tasteless third film in the series featuring the accident-prone, spliff-smoking Asian-American friends. In their first scatological movie the pair got into trouble searching for grass and a perfect hamburger in New Jersey, and back in 2005 I wrote of finding it "curiously endearing thanks to the performances of John Cho as the shy Korean-American investment banker Harold Lee and Kal Penn as the laidback Indian-American medical student Kumar Patel". In the second one, which I didn't see but which is said to be infinitely more raunchy than its predecessor, they're mistaken by homeland security for terrorists. This new one turns upon the couple's Christmas Eve hunt for a tree to placate Harold's fearsome Hispanic in-laws, and by comparison it makes Billy Bob Thornton's Bad Santa look as socially acceptable as the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols from King's College, Cambridge.

As they go on their journey to the end of the night there are jokes to offend everyone, most but not all pretty coarse, and many misfiring. They're about religion (nuns in showers, paedophile priests, Christ phoning his father), sex and sexual embarrassment, drugs (a cute baby girl accidentally smokes pot, sniffs cocaine and swallows Ecstasy), obscenity and race (Harold and Kumar are equal opportunity satirists when it comes to racial stereotypes). In his third Harold & Kumar comedy, the former child star Neil Patrick Harris of Doogie Houser, MD fame (billed as playing himself) does a wild turn as a sex-addicted singing star. The 3D is well handled – eggs explode on the camera lens, marijuana smoke floats from the screen into the audience. Few will find all of it funny, a fair number will find none of it so, and some will exit in high dudgeon.