Harold And Kumar Get The Munchies

As the title may well indicate, Harold and Kumar Get The Munchies is a stoner movie. Not just any old stoner movie mind, but quite possibly the Citizen Kane of the entire addled milieu.

Neatly subverting the notion that all Asian-Americans are over-achieving squares, the film’s titular tokers spend one disenchanted evening in search of the perfect burger – a meat sandwich from the White Castle franchise – to appease the vast quantities of THC coursing through their veins. Along their merry non-sequitured way, junior junior Wall Street drone Harold (Cho) and pre-med school drop-out Kumar (Penn) encounter a carbuncled Deliverance style pervert, a surreal bongheaded cheetah, tonnes of grass, a rampantly horny Doogie Howser and casual fratboy racism.

It’s this latter component which gives Harold And Kumar the edge over other Cheech and Chong wannabes and the film is equal parts pot and melting pot comedy. Not that one should expect any pregnant observations about multiculturalism in a movie that stages a competition of battleshits and keeps the joint jokes coming, but they’re there if you look hard enough.

Then again, who wants to wreck their own buzz? Harold And Kumar is just too fabulously entertaining to allow such matters to dominate, preferring decadent levels of scatology to minority musings. Though such an approach is too, too often indicative of a lazy-assed screenwriter nursing an unhealthy obsession with the teen demographic, the film scores an incredible hit rate with its gags. That’s all the more remarkable when one considers that director Leiner was the man responsible for the unholy Dude, Where’s My Car? Spark it up, kids.

Running Time 90mins. Cert 16. Opens March 4th.