It has been suggested that, after the box-office (and, largely, critical and artistic) failure of the big, dramatic "Iraq war" films of yesteryear, the next step at dealing with the great issue of our times in movies will be through satire. But still, Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay? It's good to know going in that they escape, but still, is everybody sure that Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg--who created the characters played by John Cho and Kal Penn in their screenplay for the 2004 Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle, and who co-wrote and co-directed the new movie-- can be trusted to address the subject of "post-9/11 paranoia" with the right tone? Speaking to Dennis Lim, Schlossberg was quick to insist, “It’s not that Guantánamo Bay itself is funny.” Okay, that's a good start. Apparently the Gitmo thread was written into the sequel partly as a response to Penn's own difficulties when he was trying to get around to promote the first film. “Once we were with a friend of mine — he’s the same age, same height as me, except he’s white,” Penn says. “I was stopped at security, but he went through even though he had a hunting knife that he forgot to take out of his backpack. They were so focused on pulling out the brown guy, they didn’t even notice.” He adds, "“That’s probably one of the only parallels between Kumar and me. We both get pulled out of line at airports.” Did you get that, studio bosses, LAPD, and Fox Network? It's one of the only parallels between them. Kal Penn does not toke up!
As Dennis Lim points out, "Race is at once central and beside the point in the Harold and Kumar movies. Casually integrating nonwhite heroes into a genre that has always been a white male preserve, the films seize on smutty, gross-out humor as the great equalizer. The signal achievement of both Harold and Kumar films is that they make race incidental without taking racism lightly; they presuppose an enlightened audience." (Or, as Schlossberg puts it, “If you don’t know that [racism is bad], you’re a moron.") Beyond that, the filmmakers resist being politically pigeonholed--which is in itself a political statement, since it implies that they reject the notion, still prevalent in some quarters, that rejecting racism is a partisan position. James Adomian turns up in the new movie as George W. Bush, an appearance that Lim describes as "while not exactly respectful, it is arguably the most sympathetic movie portrayal of him to date." “In our minds he isn’t that much different than Kumar in terms of motivation and certain life issues," says Hurwitz. "Both characters have a family trade they’re pushed toward and have a certain attitude of resistance.”
