First, we’re moving Movie Monday to Tuesday, thanks to the time needed to write and edit the reviews. We lose the alliteration, but gain quality.
The sequel to “Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle” (don’t worry if you missed the first one; this one will still make sense), the escape of the movie’s title actually is over in the first 20 minutes. After being mistaken for terrorists on a flight to Amsterdam (and they’re not going for the Van Gogh museum), Harold Lee and Kumar Patel are sent to Guantanamo. Then they escape. The rest of the movie is a dual quest: to get to Texas and get help from an politically-connected friend, and to stop the wedding of Kumar’s ex-girlfriend to said friend, who’s also kind of a jerk. The Odyssey it isn’t, but the movie’s fast pace and more-often-than-not smart humor make the film surprisingly funny. John Cho’s Harold is the moral center of the film and the steady influence on Kal Penn’s Kumar. That doesn’t mean Harold is perfectly moral; rather than being two sides of the same coin, they’re really the same person–it’s just Harold understands that one should actually get to Amsterdam before smoking pot, rather than bringing it on the plane, which Kumar does (the misunderstanding that sends them to Cuba is because someone hears “bomb” rather than “bong.”) And people assume that Kumar is Arab, when he is of Indian descent.