Movie Review
Dude, where's my little square burger?

By Ted Fry
Special to The Seattle Times

SOPHIE GIRAUD / NEW LINE PRODUCTIONS John Cho, left, and Kal Penn in "Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle."

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An ad campaign that prominently features the tagline, "From the director of 'Dude, Where's My Car?' " usually doesn't leave room for expectations much higher than a string of stupid jokes.

Not that those expectations will be dashed, but it's a delightful surprise that "Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle" is so hilarious for pretty much all the reasons it should be so predictably brainless.

Roommates Harold and Kumar are sort of a Cheech and Chong for the "American Pie" generation. That includes the ethnicity — Harold (John Cho) is the geekier, more responsible Korean American and Kumar (Kal Penn) is the slacker-genius South Asian American — as well as an eternal obsession with finding and consuming the best pot.

One of the reasons "Harold and Kumar" succeeds so effortlessly is that it takes everything about itself for granted. There are a few allusions to racism and bigotry, but they fly breezily by along with all the other dumb "plot" points about sex, bathrooms, bodily fluids, killer bud and feeding the munchies with the perfect food for that particular high.

Movie review Showtimes and trailer *** "Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle," with John Cho, Kal Penn, Neil Patrick Harris, Anthony Anderson, Fred Willard. Directed by Danny Leiner, from a script by Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg. 90 minutes. Rated R for strong language, sexual content, drug use and some crude humor. Several theaters.

Which is where White Castle comes in. It's a bold marketing move for the regional hamburger chain famous for satisfying munchies of every variety. (Alas, we in the Northwest must rely on frozen-food-aisle White Castles.)

But all you need to know is that Harold and Kumar must have White Castle burgers, and that no amount of 21st-century teen-gross-out road-movie contrivances will keep them from roaming all over New Jersey to achieve this goal. Not a ruthless band of "extreme" sports dudes, not vengeful law-enforcement officers, not even Neil Patrick Harris, appearing as himself and taking obvious glee in butchering his "Doogie Howser" rep for all time.

It'll have to be an individual choice whether you use the word "guilty" in describing the funny-as-hell pleasure of "Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle."
 
Ted Fry: tedfry@earthlink.net