The stoner movie gets political--sort of

Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle was a classic stoner movie, tasteless, pointless, meandering, and funny. It took forever to get to the cheap hamburgers and the fun was getting there. This time things go very differently. Out comes the bong on the plane to Amsterdam, the white bigot passengers go bonkers, Kumar is racially profiled, and he and his Asian buddy are off to a hideous prison in Cuba where they don't belong and the homophobic guards force the prisoners to service them sexually.

Choosing the US prison at Guantanamo as the starting point for a stoner comedy is the sign of a new direction. There's still dope aplenty on screen, but dope is more a pretext than a preoccupation. It's also a given here that a lot of Americans think Guantanamo is so illegal and dumb it's laughable. (Abu Gharib or Bagram wouldn't work that way.) While last time the classic buddies were only headed for a cheap solution to the munchies, now they're struggling to save their very skins. They meet up with Homeland Security, the prison guards, the Ku Klux Klan, a southern redneck couple with an inbred child, a bunch of big black men they racially profile as enemies, and Neil Patrick Harris, on 'shrooms and alcohol and hallucinating himself riding a shimmering silver unicorn--then lusting after a super-boobed prostitute in a brothel whom he brands with a hot iron, while Harold and Kumar separately in rooms full of the girls tell their tales of woe and get sympathy, instead of sex. This is scattershot stuff, no more coherent than a stoner train of thought. The boys are in search of love too, Harold hunting down a girl in Amsterdam and Kumar out to save his ex Vanessa (Danneel Harris) from marriage to somebody else. The worst villain in the whole movie is Colton (Eric Winter), the handsome and duplicitous lily-white rich boy who's about to marry her. For sure the non-white viewpoint of the main characters is expressed more fully here.

If you treated Guantanamo seriously you'd cry more than you'd laugh, but there's no seriousness in this movie--or at least no reverence. Escape from Guantanamo Bay seems more hell bent to prove its mind is in the gutter than to score points. If you revere Homeland Security bullies and the Ku Klux Klan and President Bush you won't like this movie, but that's not too much of a risk for ticket sales. And Bush turns out to be a good old boy. He's a hypocrite but he proves every man is. The scene with W. is nothing more than a Saturday Night Live sequence, but the feeling it gives of being in the belly of the beast is rather exhilarating.

It's hard to be shocked or surprised by anything today, but some of this movie's scenes from the very outset are so gross you want to look away, or occasion a double take, like the party given by the buddies' rich Persian friend Raza (Amir Talai) where all the babes are bottomless.

The buddies this time are not pursuing but pursued, victims of the racism, xenophobia, and paranoia so great that a "bong" on a plane to Amsterdam is mistaken for a "bomb" and a Korean American and an Indian American with dark skin are taken for Muslim terrorists bent on blowing up a plane full of (white) Americans. There are Homeland Security and NSA heavies (fighting for control, one actually smart enough to know the boys are innocent) and the Homeland Security guy is a mass of prejudices against Jews, people of color, Muslims, foreigners in general, anything non-local and non-white. But as an indictment of US policy and post-9/11 chauvinism this is still not very sharp. Kumar tells Agent Fox (Rob Corddry): "We're not Terrorists. We're not even Muslims. And even if we were Muslims, that wouldn't make us Terrorists!" Is this an insight? Maybe for the great unwashed and a lot of the US military, it actually is. But this movie is not a great leap forward for Muslims in America. The only Muslims the audience sees in it are terrorists.

Very little of this movie made me laugh. Maybe I should have been stoned. I wondered walking out if new American film comedies are going to seem funny to me any more. But it did make me feel good.

The stoner buddy experience, on a lighthearted (not a bad trip) level, which essentially must be lacking in any redeeming social and political value, is better represented in White Castle, or even Danny Leiner's Dude, Where's My Car.Dude's buddy couple of Ashton Kutcher and Seann William Scott may seem a little too white from the Harry and Kumar perspective, but Ashton and Seann are well in tune to each other and to the laid-back-ness of the stoner mystique. A better yet representation of the stoner experience (solo, or rather sola) featuring a girl (Anna Faris) is Gregg Araki's recent Smiley Face. But for political and social punch, scattershot and crude as it is, the creators and perpetuaters of this franchise, Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg, have set a new standard with Escape from Guantanamo Bay. Maybe. I'm still searching for the redeeming social value of this movie, but for the integrity of the genre, it's better not to find it.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.