Column: Harold and Kumar: a letdown
May 2, 2008
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Last week’s release of “Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay” is a good reason to explain the difference between a dumb movie and a stupid movie, because it is most certainly the latter.
Allow me. A dumb movie is the kind of stupid comedy or action movie you walk out of enjoying, either in spite of or because of its inherent dumbness. It might be poorly made; its script might be packed with overwrought clichés or telegraphed jokes; but there is something about a dumb movie, like a dumb dog, that compels you to enjoy it. It charms you, intentionally or unintentionally. It makes an excellent rental. (Think anything starring Jean-Claude Van Damme, or “Teen Wolf.”)
A stupid movie is just stupid. And this is a stupid movie.
Like the first, this “Harold & Kumar” is a road movie. Our intrepid stoners are waylaid again, this time on the way to Amsterdam to win over a girl. They find themselves in Guantanamo Bay, among other places, being really stupid. Unfortunately, as the title proclaims, they do manage to escape. What keeps Harold and Kumar from being dumb-movie-heroes, in the exciting tradition of Billy Madison or Bill and Ted, is that they are also smarmy jackasses. They are the dumb dog that won’t stop humping your leg, or — at the risk of abandoning the metaphor too soon — fixating on masturbation jokes and things that defecate.
But amid this parade of dick jokes and crapping animals, this irredeemable mess of a movie wants us to believe that its brain-dead principals are being smart and subversive with their blunt, dated political and pop cultural references. They are not. They have all the sharp-edged political and social wit of your drunk, vaguely racist uncle, just before the Thanksgiving turkey mercifully knocks him out. The movie’s comments on, variously, racial profiling, the Bush administration, people from the deep South and topless parties, are probably already lurking in any number of forwarded e-mails you haven’t yet deleted from your GMail account.
As if its stupidity weren’t terrible enough in its comedic moments, “Harold & Kumar” seems completely unaware of its own ridiculousness when it comes time to have dramatic things happen to its characters. Harold and Kumar’s various romantic intrigues are played out in uncomfortably un-ironic flashbacks; our stupid protagonists are suddenly to be taken seriously in hackneyed romances with generic hot young coeds. This movie is so obviously not to be taken seriously that it takes a special kind of tone-deafness to make no fewer than five abrupt shifts to absurd melodrama.
“Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay” is poorly made, ludicrously scripted and unaware of its own shortcomings. If it didn’t have all the charm of one of those videos that actually comes out of Guantanamo Bay, it might be a pretty good dumb movie. But it’s not — it’s just really, really stupid.
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