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Anyone can come up with jokes about incestuous rednecks or pubic hair that "looks like Osama bin Laden's beard," but it takes guts to make a comedy in which the Indian-American hero accuses an African-American TSA agent of racial profiling, all so he won't get caught smuggling weed onto a plane.
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75It's not exactly high art, but it's certainly high.
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75At the screening I attended, someone walked in wearing a shirt that read "I HEART BONGS," so that gives you a pretty good idea of the target audience. Maybe this time they will rouse themselves from the couch and make it possible for us to follow Harold and Kumar through more adventures.
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75The big payoff, of course, is Neil Patrick Harris reprising his role as "Neil Patrick Harris."
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70Honestly, the most shocking thing put forth in Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay just might be the proposition that George W. Bush is actually a pretty cool guy.
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70That rare sequel that builds on the movie that came before it without crushing its attributes to death. "Escape" doesn't feel belabored. Giddy, freewheeling and sweet-natured, it pulls off the effect of seeming spontaneous, a tall task by itself.
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70Precisely because their attitudes are so bluntly hedonistic and apolitical, Harold and Kumar manage to be fairly persuasive when they get around to criticizing the status quo, which the movie has the wit to acknowledge itself as part of.
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70Harold and Kumar are pothead patriots in the first feel-good torture film.
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70An over-the-top and beyond-PC comedy that sometimes deftly, sometimes slapdashedly infuses party-hearty anarchy with hectoring moral outrage.
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70They are Abbott & Costello with dirty mouths--indomitable, ungovernable, and possibly immortal.
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67Harold and Kumar, fortunately, never lose their verbally relentless way of delivering raunch as pure common sense.
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63If only the wit weren't overwhelmed by lame jokes about body parts, functions and fluids.
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63Mostly, Harold is a guilty pleasure that retains the anarchic charms of the original.
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63The movie is unpolished, unabashedly un-PC, and takes on as many "sacred cows" as it can uncover in a slightly-too-long 105 minutes.
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63No political tract, but it can be surprisingly bold.
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60The jokes all revolve around weed, stereotypes, and Neil Patrick Harris; the stereotype stuff is by far the funniest.
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Lacks the fresh charm that made their first such an unexpected (if guilty) pleasure.
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50You find yourself smiling at some of the bits, wincing through many, many others, and ultimately wondering if the pacing would've improved had either H or K developed a terrible cocaine habit.
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50Among the variations of gags from the original are a threesome involving Harold, Kumar and a giant bag of marijuana.
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50Is a truly political stoner movie even possible? The entire point of getting high is to take some of the sting out of life. The movie goes after easy targets and goes soft on the harder issues.
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50It can devote itself entirely to bodily functions or, having established its grossness quotient, take the high road toward satire like its 2004 predecessor, "Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle." It fails mainly because it does neither.
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50Mostly dumb, no matter how desperately and even valiantly it aims for "thinky."
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50It exploits post-9/11 anxieties as fodder for goofball gooniness. "Dr. Strangelove" it's not.
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42The movie is sporadically funny in an anarchistic way. But Cho and Penn don't have the needed personality or comic identity to sustain a franchise and their non-drug humor is so crude and scatological that -- to say the least -- it leaves a very bad taste in the mouth.
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40It's a big fat missed opportunity.
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40It betrays the spirit of the stoner comedy, which has traditionally been subversive--when it wasn't detailing the love affair between two marginally functional young men and their stash of sweet, sweet herb.
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30A largely mind-numbing experience.
User score distribution:
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Positive: 31 out of 52
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Mixed: 5 out of 52
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Negative: 16 out of 52
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