The title reads Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay, but there is very little of Gitmo that one gets to see through the film. It's not as if the "escape" is a series of attempted, if blundering, plans either. This movie is, in fact, about classic stereotyping across America - a concentrated, Americanized Eurotrip as it were, with of course, all the things that make up an R-rated movie - plenty of swearing, sex, and drugs.The movie begins where the first one left off - having had their fill of White Castle burgers, the duo pack their bags and head to the airport so they can travel to Amsterdam where Harold's (John Cho) new girlfriend Maria (Paula Garces) is visiting. While there, they run into Kumar's (Kal Penn) ex-girlfriend Vanessa (Danneel Harris) , who is now engaged to political wonderchild, Colton (Eric Winter). Vanessa, as it is revealed, introduced Kumar to his other great love, marijuana while the two were in college.
While on the plane, a paranoid passenger points Kumar out as a terrorist, leading to the duo being carted off to Guantanamo Bay, from where they escape with remarkable ease. From there on, the two embark on a journey through the American heartland, spattered with tremendous cliches, plenty of nudity and a surprising amount of violence. The journey culminates in expected endings, with some rather unexpected guest appearances.
Words like crude, vulgar, too sexual, and too banal all ring very hollow at the end of this two odd hour long spectacle, which seems to take pleasure in identifying every taste bud a viewer might have and destroying them individually. To be fair, I had hoped that all the the flinching, cringing, and slapping my hand over my eyes would be made tolerable by the acting skills of Cho and Penn, who managed to endear themselves to audiences in the first Harold and Kumar. Their unlikely friendship, in spite of the stark differences in personality tied that film together and left the audience feeling that in spite of it all, boys will be boys, no matter how hard they try to be men. However, in Escape from Guantanamo Bay, that friendship becomes nothing more than a lot of painful bickering, and the characters very one-dimensionally frustrated and frustrating, respectively. And for those who can't get enough of Neil Patrick Harris, I'd be surprised if even they don't walk out of the theaters, shaking their heads and groaning.
The only bright spark is at the end of the arduous journey, when Kumar recites a poem he had composed in his nerdier days before he met Vanessa (and marijuana), which is one of the cleverest, most entertaining pieces of writing to have emerged from the mind of a character trying to marry mathematics and love. The verse fits Penn, the character of Kumar and the situation brilliantly and offers up the one truly original aspect of a film riddled with obvious cliches.
You'd have to love poetry, mathematics, extremely crude humor and Cho and Penn enormously to wait for that moment, though.
