For stoner comedy fans, the duo of Kal Penn and John Cho returning once again for a third Harold and Kumar movie (this set on Christmas Eve) might be ideal, but I guess I'm not particularly the audience for it. I did watch the first film (and some of the second), admittedly, but after realizing I wasn't really the kind of viewer that would appreciate its brand of shock-value humor and weed-smoking shenanigans pursuing a sequel wasn't as much a must but rather for its seasonal reasons. It does have a Santa (Richard Riehle) smoking from a bong, all high, while up in his sleigh, having survived a gunshot wound to the head when Cho accidentally fires towards the sky unknowingly in his direction! No worries: Penn repairs his wound after removing the bullet and sewing him up! Penn failed a drug test which resulted in his failure to finish medical school and he learns from Danneel Ackles (girlfriend to Kumar, Vanessa) that she's pregnant with his child. While Kumar and Vanessa are estranged and he's too high too often to have a decent conversation (she says he's not an adult with any maturity to handle such a responsibility as raising a child). Meanwhile a package arrives at Kumar's mess of an apartment (he fails to keep it clean, deciding instead to spend time with his bong, emitting its mind-altering sustenance to Kumar, after scoring some weed from Patton Oswalt's department store Santa in a parking garage!), with Harold's name on it...this leads to Kumar bringing it to Harold's Christmas overtly gratuitously decorated house, opening it to find a long blunt, resulting in wind blowing it, after its lit, into a Christmas tree brought over by father-in-law Danny Trejo. Paula Garcés is Harold's Latino wife, looking to get pregnant (on purpose unlike Kumar and Vanessa's situation), Maria. Trejo's obsessive Christmas fervor makes Harold work hard to earn his favor which isn't easy to come by. The tree going up in flames with Harold and Kumar inadvertently brought together to find another one (their friends are tagalongs in the overall film; Amir Blumenfeld is Kumar's horny buddy looking to get laid at a party held by the daughter of a kingpin (Elias Koteas) while Thomas Lennon is Harold's square dad friend from Wall Street, with daughter in tow, who seems more like an assistant than pal). There is plenty of shady humor such as a little girl accompanying Lennon who gets high from Kumar's bong exposure and cocaine exploded in her direction, Neil Patrick Harris' apparent faux homosexuality publicity stunt while secretly a skirt-chasing sleaze, claymation drug-induced fantasy that has plenty of gory violence and jaw-dropping stop-motion content, and the expected minority jokes that will certainly offend some who watch it. Like Trejo's extended family arriving to stay at Harold's home, with a comment wondering how all of them would fit under one roof or Trejo's past flashback to his mother's death at the hands of Korean hoods or two African-Americans at a tree-selling establishment using "good salesman/bad salesman" tactics (RZA works at type of gangster persona to rattle Penn and Blumenfeld with complaints that his being a black man gives them pause) to scare customers into buying what they have on their lot. There's Patrick Harris' "trip to Heaven" where he meets Jesus who has a doll (angels who look like they arrived out of a Victoria Secret model shoot) on both arms while Saint Peter is a bouncer at his club called "Heaven", foretold to Kumar and Harold after nearly molesting a personal fan who believes he's gay. The 3-D process is poked fun at as everything from eggs (tossed at Harold's assistant at his Wall Street high rise when protestors responded from their rage), to blunts fly right at the screen...I thought these attempts to satirize the process so overused in the theaters at the time (and still somewhat today) work okay, hit and miss. I thought the film itself was so low-brow and trashy (as it never intended to be anything else but this) that such methods for playful mockery are to be expected. This will undoubtedly still win some hearts as it still aims to please those who eat this stuff up, but when you have a kid high on coke climbing the walls and requesting a fight with a mobster, the bar is most certainly low. The holiday aesthetic is here, and you get plenty of music from the past, with the pursuit of a tree involving Christmas into the plot, although this does at least establish that Harold and Kumar are no longer juvenile and so recklessly irresponsible, even as they might still smoke a joint together every now and then. After watching Penn on "House", and Cho working in more serious adult work, I just felt they are above this kind of nonsense now. NPH still appears to be enjoying himself. I do believe this kind of film will not be greenlit by Hollywood with any great regularity as it once was...feathers are ruffled quite a bit now, and when innocent pop culture icons like "Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer" are picked apart and questioned, what will that say about a Harold and Kumar comedy where Trejo hands over a camera to Penn as he plans to get a family picture, because "Penn's people are known for taking photos". Oh and Koteas' virginal daughter won't sleep with Kumar because "he's dark". While there are those in an audience who take all of this in stride and not too seriously, we are in a society that is gradually unwilling to tolerate certain types of content anymore.
Review of A Very Harold & Kumar Christmas
