Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle (R)

Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle (R)
By M. Chad Durham

My college baseball coach used to always say, “Let’s start with the negative and work towards the positive,” after a loss. For this film, let’s try the opposite approach.

There are three things I find noble and refreshing about this film. First, its leading characters are two minorities often overlooked by Hollywood. Second, it does not reduce these characters to mere caricatures. Third, it shamelessly plugs White Castle and those tasty little burgers, which I confess I’ve never had the opportunity to try but my, oh my do they look good. Or maybe I’m just on a diet?

For all its liberal glitz, glamour, pomp, and meaningless rhetoric, Hollywood continues to portray minorities in stereotypical ways, seldom affording decent opportunities to Orientals and Eastern Indians in particular. They are often relegated to second tier bit parts to whites, African-Americans, and Hispanics. (Even African-American films frequently stereotype Orientals and East-Indians.) Hollywood is lagging way behind in its treatment of these “other” minorities. The marketing campaign for “Harold and Kumar” even carried a racist tagline, proudly proclaiming, “That Oriental guy from American Pie and that Indian guy from Van Wilder.”

To be fair, we are talking about John Cho and Kal Penn respectively and together they are an interesting comic duo. They play off of one another well and aren’t afraid to look foolish in the process. They are the latest in a long line of “stoner” characters to surface in American pop-culture. Only time will tell if this duo can join the ranks of Cheech and Chong, Jay and Silent Bob, Bevis and Butthead, Shaggy and Scooby. Loveable slacking stoners are a dime a dozen. Do we really have more room in our hearts for Harold and Kumar?
While there are a couple of sequences that border on comic genius, most scenes resort to classic stoner-flick clichés. I find it all so ironic—the characters aren’t clichéd but the writers are so desperate for a story they tell us one that is totally clichéd. We’ve seen all this stuff before and it has been done better: by Cheech and Chong, by Kevin Smith and his pal Jay, and even Shaggy sans bong. Every time the script runs into trouble, the writers reach into their bag for yet another joke about latent homosexuality.
Harold and Kumar, a couple of frustrated young professionals still clinging to their college days, spend their pathetic existence getting high every weekend. In an ultra thin plot, Harold is having problems at work and even more problems summoning the courage to talk to the girl of his dreams; meanwhile Kumar is trying to keep his father’s financial support and somehow avoid going to medical school. They truly are just two every-day guys trying to deal with the disillusionment they feel in life. Cho and Penn are affable and the quest for White Castle burgers is one many can relate to, but I doubt they will ever achieve the same status of the aforementioned legends. But, I could be wrong. Maybe America is ready for yet another dynamic stoner duo.

I’m going to give Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle a RENTAL rating. It is a mediocre film in every way. Part of me was really pulling for it to be better, but alas, a feeble story stood in their way.