HAROLD & KUMAR GO TO WHITE CASTLE

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Multi-Culti Stoners
Harold & Kumar Bring on High Times
By Cole Smithey

"Dude, Where’s My White Castle?" could easily have been the title for this pot-infused comic buddy movie by director Danny Leiner ("Dude, Where’s My Car?").

The amiable film is groundbreaking for its fresh depiction of Asian American and Indian American youth culture, with characters that resonate in an immediate way that Hollywood films seldom promote.

Corporate day-slave Harold (John Cho – "American Pie") and his med-school roommate Kumar (Kal Penn – "Malibu’s Most Wanted") are a couple of regular guys with a serious case of Friday night munchies that dispatch them on a wild New Jersey journey in search of White Castle hamburgers.

Our fearless heroes suffer all manners of mischievous goofball experiences on their quest for mass quantities of the only burger that can satisfy their similarly demanding palates. You’ll laugh, you’ll laugh, and you’ll laugh — especially if you see the movie in the cannabis-enhanced glaze that the filmmakers intend.

Harold flips out on Kumar early in the movie when he discovers him clipping his pubes in front of a mirror in Harold’s room. It’s a funny scene that speaks volumes about the kind of candid, ribald friendship the two main characters share. John Cho and Kal Penn both have a spiky naturalism that correlates with their good-hearted demeanors. Harold has a crush on a neighbor girl (Paula Garces) who he sees frequently in his building’s elevator, but he's so shy that he can only fantasize about ever speaking to her.

Kumar, on the other hand, is an ace med-school student who ironically doesn’t give a rat’s ass about being a doctor like his dad, and who has no insecurities around girls. It’s this duality of complimenting personality traits that Cho and Penn riff on with a complex chemistry that works like a sharp knife on warm bread. Many of the comic moments that occur, come from these two talented actors knowingly tapping their Americanized multi-cultural backgrounds to signal laughs.

Upon hitting the road on their sacred mission, Harold and Kumar discover that a former White Castle has been taken over by an inferior chain of fast food. But they are willing to make the 40-mile trip to the next White Castle to quell their nagging hunger.

A toll booth mishap causes Harold to toss their weed out of the car. Kumar insists on stopping by Princeton University to score another bag of the herbal refreshment. The boys not only obtain a huge bag of pot from a campus hippie, but also meet a couple of college girls they think are incredibly hot until a shared bathroom experience gives the boys too much information about the young ladies' competitive potty habits.

Screenwriters Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg escalate a maze of weird obstacles and comic episodes with a guffaw-inducing incident involving a horribly ugly auto mechanic nicknamed "Freakshow" (Christopher Meloni) and his all-too-beautiful wife.

Freakshow rescues the boys after they wreck their car, and take them back to his house where he offers to fix their car while they sleep with his wife. Harold and Kumar aren’t sure of Freakshow’s peculiar offer until they’re left alone with his lascivious wife. The scene is a classic experiment in a comic situation pushed beyond the realm of funny and into an area of off-the-hook hilarity.

The introduction of horny-out-of-control hitchhiker Neil Patrick Harris, playing himself, as a party-boy-has-been puts a surreal glow over the movie. "Harold & Kumar Go To White Castle" is, as its name implies, a take-no-prisoners postmodern comedy that revels in stereotype-bending and ill-humor.

There’s a sweetness to the dippy narrative that creates a blissful sense of American reality predicated on the glory of achieving a deceptively simple goal — like eating burgers at White Castle. "Expect less and achieve more" is one way of digesting the moral of a story where a couple of ambivalent overachievers get their stoke on.

Rated R. 88 mins.