Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay

There's just enough fear and loathing percolating beneath the madcap zaniness to indicate that the filmmakers have not even begun to stop worrying and love the status quo.

Building on the multicultural absurdism of 2003's Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle, it will appeal to multiple audiences: the young, the hip and the stoned.

A stoner comedy for fans of EuroTrip and Starship Troopers.

This may be the most deliberately unapologetic politically-incorrect movie ever made, and it's so wrong in so many ways.

Essentially the Godfather II of stoner comedies -- a film that expands the landscape of its characters and story, and to many, will easily qualify as superior to its predecessor.

Like its fried forerunner, 2004's Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle, the crude, lewd Escape offers a mix of nasty toilet jokes and sex gags.

At the screening I attended, someone walked in wearing a shirt that read "I HEART BONGS," so that gives you a pretty good idea of the target audience.

Harold and Kumar fire up the bong and the raunchiest comedy you can imagine in the new bungling adventure Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay.

This sequel edges close to Borat in its outrageous political imaginings.

Some gags are inspired in their extreme crudeness and toked-up surrealism, and others are simply lazy and base, targeted at the sniggering 14-year-old boys who snuck into the back row of the theater.

At a time when race is at the forefront of the American discussion, it presents the topic in a way at which we can laugh.

The movie's essential generosity of spirit comes to a ticklish climax when the boys light one up with Dubya himself, played spot-on as a paternally repressed good ol' boy by comic James Adomian.

It takes guts to make a comedy in which the Indian-American hero accuses an African-American TSA agent of racial profiling, all so he won’t get caught smuggling weed onto a plane.

Nothing matches your first time, but Escape From Guantanamo is still a liberating low humour experience.

A fitfully funny if somewhat less excellent sequel.

The Harold and Kumar strategy is to approach the subject of Patriot Act excesses with jokes about poop, pee, hookers, drugs, and Neil Patrick Harris.

The raunchy, one-upmanship style of comedy is almost Borat-esque at times but with less natural wit and missing the thrill of real-time confrontation.

If it’s lowbrow raunchy comedy you want, this second Harold and Kumar installment fits the bill. These lovable stoners just grow on you.

Manages to get laughs, but often with cringe-inducing lowbrow material that will have audiences shaking their heads, wondering if laughing at that particular joke was OK.

Unlike White Castle, it's a bit predictable, and some of the setpieces -- a KKK meeting, a bottomless party -- sound funnier than they are.

This is one of those rare pictures that can gross you out and make you think at one and the same time.

If only the wit weren't overwhelmed by lame jokes about body parts, functions and fluids.

In a film that is even more raunchy and raucous than its predecessor, Harold and Kumar are still focused on the pleasures of weed and wild women, but this long, strange trip of a sequel also is surprisingly subversive and politically charged.

Only popcorn, chocolate and soda were available at the theater, so maybe we just had the wrong chemicals in our system when we saw this.

So wickedly subversive is the juvenile humor in this sure-to-romp sequel, it could be studied in classes about how to battle bigotry by circumventing the cerebral cortex.

Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay takes the lowbrow comedy to somewhere it’s never been before.

As with White Castle, much of the humor is about as sophisticated as a college kegger. Within the opening minutes, there’s a brief, sex-related sight gag that no doubt will repulse as many viewers as it entertains.

The film feels careless and calculated at once: careless in its assembly, calculated in an attempt to copy Castle.

You find yourself smiling at some of the bits, wincing through many, many others, and ultimately wondering if the pacing would've improved had either H or K developed a terrible cocaine habit.

The jokes that actually work successfully in Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay are the same ones that worked in its predecessor, the surprise 2004 comedy hit.

Scattered laughs and the stars' charm keep the film's head above water, though now that Neil Patrick Harris is a TV star again his obligatory (but still amusing) cameo no longer feels so inspired.

I didn't laugh anywhere near as much at this far less fresh sequel -- which is broader, more vulgar, more scattershot, more overtly political and a lot less funny than it sounds on paper.

If there's anything to be learned from Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay, the sequel to the 2004 stoner classic Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle, it's that the second puff of a joint isn't as satisfying as the first toke.

The movie is sporadically funny in an anarchistic way.

It's as if the filmmakers were doing something that impaired their concentration and made them lose focus on something they started.

Characters appear out of nowhere and just as suddenly vanish; some jokes don't pay off, and the scenes don't really track. The whole film feels easily distracted and apt to laugh at anything.

The occasionally snicker-worthy Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay provides some of what fans want from its stoner heroes, but given the high-concept title, it's a big fat missed opportunity.

Some movies dare to play the race card. Harold and Kumar throws in the whole deck.

Written and directed by Hayden Schlossberg and Jon Hurwitz, who demonstrate low-tech faithfulness to the movie's scatological pursuits: Almost every scene looks vomited up.

What makes this comedy useless is the fact that only a few jokes in it cause a smile.

Cho and Penn remain an engaging duo, yet here their bickering has a listlessness that's matched by an easy reliance on raunchy but uninspired fart, poop, and semen jokes.

The only thing Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo has in its favor is its lead actors, who are infinitely better than the words they are required to spew and the things they have been told to do in the service of this film.

Harold and Kumar Go to Amsterdam would have been a better sequel.