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'Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay'

Everybody's fave Asian-American stoners are back — and as you'll have guessed from the title, they're a tad less apolitical than when they went to White Castle.

Which is not to suggest that the celebrated military lockup in Cuba — or the racial profiling that lands our heroes there — figures terribly prominently in the duo's latest pot-fueled odyssey. An in-flight mix-up with a bong (which sounds a bit like "bomb," no?) gets the vacationing Harold (John Cho) and Kumar (Kal Penn) branded terrorists. After a quick trip to Gitmo, they work their way from calamity to catastrophe, with the feds hot on their heels.

Among their adventures: crashing both a KKK rally and a bottomless (as in bikinis) party, visiting a whorehouse with a 'shrooms-gobbling Neil Patrick Harris, waking an inbred mutant child in Alabama, wrecking a wedding in Texas, wreaking havoc in Amsterdam, and ... well, there's plenty more, but wouldnt you rather discover it for yourself?

The jokes are spacey (and spaced a bit more widely than last time), the sight-gags crude, the titular duo sweet, and the politics somewhat unexpected. George Dubya, for instance, comes across affirmatively, albeit in ways that the president's conservative base isn't likely to embrace. (He and Kumar are kindred spirits, it turns out.)

H&K's earlier adventures didn't score at the box office, but they've become a smash on DVD. Their Escape from Guantanamo should please that fan base — and maybe augment it a bit, too.

Copyright 2022 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Bob Mondello, who jokes that he was a jinx at the beginning of his critical career — hired to write for every small paper that ever folded in Washington, just as it was about to collapse — saw that jinx broken in 1984 when he came to NPR.
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