This third installment of the Harold & Kumar franchise, a series of comedies about a couple of stoner buddies, sees it’s protagonists Harold Lee (John Cho) and Kumar Patel (Kal Penn) estranged from one another. Harold has moved on with his life, becoming a married man with a successful job and a big house. Kumar, however, is stuck in a rut. He still lives in their old apartment, he still smokes weed all day, and his girlfriend has recently had enough and walked out on him. This could have been an interesting setup to tell a Harold & Kumar story with a bit more depth and complexity than what we got in the first two installments. Could rekindling an old friendship teach Harold to stop worrying and enjoy his life more, might a reconnection with Harold teach Kumar the simple pleasures of hard work and reward? That’s not the sort of movie A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas is though. Like its predecessors, this movie exists only as a series of raunchy gags; a vehicle for wiener, drug, and race jokes.
And that’s fine. There’s certainly a place in the world for filthy humor, and every once in a while a movie like this can be a welcome diversion from more heady endeavors. But it has to be funny. The problem with the Harold & Kumar series is that beyond the first installment, Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle, I haven’t laughed at these movies much at all. The jokes here are just so easy, so lazy. The setups are so obvious you can see the punchline coming from a mile away. And your expectations are never subverted. It’s always the most obvious gag that gets used, the most obvious punchline that pays off a setup. While I will admit that there were a number of people in my audience laughing at pretty much everything, I found myself shaking my head at how unimaginative the raunch was, how devoid of wit the offensive comments were. I don’t see any actual joke crafting going into these films whatsoever. While Go to White Castle worked because it was madcap and unpredictable, these Harold & Kumar sequels feel formulaic, like mass produced product.
The story here is that Harold’s father in law Mr. Perez (Danny Trejo) is obsessed with Christmas trees. He has yet to really accept Harold into his family, and presenting the Perez family with a perfectly decorated Christmas tree seems to be the in that Harold needs. The only problem is, during a visit from his old friend Kumar, the very specific 12 foot Douglas Fir that Mr. Perez has lovingly grown himself gets set on fire and thrown out a window. Thus the quest for a replacement tree begins. The search for a new tree is a perfectly acceptable MacGuffin for a Harold & Kumar movie, and it ends up taking them to all of the strange places you might imagine, but the script takes too long to get there. The whole first act spends so much time establishing what a screwup Kumar still is, and what a perfect life Harold has made for himself ever since he dumped his old friend, that I really expected a more complex resolution to that storyline. But one never came. All we get is a simple, surface level story of old friends reconnecting. For the breach to be repaired so easily, it felt strange to spend so much time establishing how big the rift between them had gotten; especially since I was squirming about a half hour in, waiting for some sort of story to finally develop.
The biggest hurdles in front of a pared down story that would have moved with more momentum are the characters of Adrian (Amir Blumenfeld) and Todd (Thomas Lennon), the guys who Kumar and Harold have tried to replace their old best friends with. Blumenfeld and Lennon are funny in the roles, with Adrian being an immature annoyance so grating that you want to reach into the screen and strangle him, and Todd being a white guy so lame and snooty that you want to shake Harold and ask him how he could hang out with such a dork, but their characters felt completely unnecessary. While they serve a purpose in that lengthy first act, after Harold and Kumar get reunited the Adrian and Todd characters get dumped into a B plot that slowed down the film. The main gag of this B plot is that Todd’s baby keeps inadvertently being given drugs and then they have to deal with the consequences. Once again, this secondary story wouldn’t have been such a problem if it had actually been funny. But past obvious jokes like the baby getting the munchies after she’s given marijuana, or getting really hyper after she’s given cocaine, co-screenwriters and directors Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg have nothing. Though I’m not so sensitive when it comes to my entertainment, I’m sure a large part of the mainstream audience out there must have been horribly offended by depictions of a toddler being given narcotics. Is it really worth alienating them from your film to make yet another “I’ve got the munchies” pot joke?
This script isn’t just lazy in its joke writing either, it also takes no pains to craft a story that naturally flows from point A to point B. A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas feels like a series of short skits that have been crudely patched together. The characters get through one crazy set piece where they’re trying to find a tree, fail, and then right as they’ve realized that there is no hope... look, another 12 foot Douglas Fir off in the distance! And then they simply stroll into the next set piece. There is no connection between any of these small stories, no point where everything comes together in the end like an episode of Seinfeld, and consequently what we’re watching never feels like a coherent film. At one point the script strands the two main characters out in the middle of nowhere, and it backs itself into a corner. What now? How do we get the guys on to the next bit? The solution is just to have Harold randomly start shooting a shotgun into the air; an act that is way out of character for him. He gives a brief explanation that he saw what he’s doing in a movie once, but such lip service to logic felt more insulting than anything else. What happens next is that they shoot down Santa’s Sleigh, which gives them a ride back to where the story needs them to be. Just one deus ex machina development in a movie that is chock full of them.
Some people might watch this film and be offended by all of the penises, or the rampant drug use, or the crude sexual humor, or the crass racist comments, but I found myself offended at just how lazy the whole thing was. This movie feels like an obligation everybody involved had to get through rather than something fun that they wanted to make. And consequently it becomes a chore for the audience as well. The jokes are all too easy, the narrative is barely strung together with the thinnest thread, and what you end up with is a movie that just tries to be as crude as possible to divert you from the fact that it has nothing at all to say. I wasn’t diverted, I was just struck at how unnatural the crudeness now felt coming out of these rapidly aging characters’ mouths. Harold & Kumar used to at least have affection for its leads, but at some point it just got mean.
No review of a Harold & Kumar movie should conclude without at least mentioning the Neil Patrick Harris cameo. His hard partying, super straight version of himself that he’s come up with for these movies has been by far the highlight of the series. So, of course, he shows up again in this third installment, and again he’s really great at what he does. We get some of that classic NPH pervy grossness, he has fun playing around with his real life persona, and generally he just outacts everyone around him to hilarious effect. But this is the least essential NPH appearance in any of these movies yet. This one, more than the others, really is just a cameo. And for the first time ever, NPH isn’t the person who completely steals a Harold & Kumar movie out from under everyone else. This time that privilege goes to Wafflebot, a waffle making robot companion for at home and on the go. Wafflebot is adorable, and hilarious, and awesome. And it’s pretty much due solely to his pancake hating charms that this movie isn’t sitting at the very bottom of my 2011 list, rubbing elbows with dreck like Something Borrowed and Season of the Witch.
