Seven Oaks Magazine.

To think a low-brow stoner comedy can ask an important question – namely, what is ethnic diversity? – is in the realm of thumbsucking, post-modern criticism, where it seems everything committed to celluloid is an important cultural contribution. To believe it goes some distance in answering it may seem like squeezing water from a rock. It is, nevertheless, the case. Harold (John Cho) and Kumar’s (Kal Penn) quest is not only the stuff of comedy – it’s barely that – but a deliberation on tolerance and acceptance. If Indians and Koreans are American, do they toke up like other good Americans?

It’s a good question wrapped in a terrible, but terribly entertaining film. The cynical impression is to think Harold & Kumar Go To White Castle is feature-length affirmation that “Indians and Asians get stoned too, dude! Let’s hoot!” The more informed, and perhaps forgiving impression, is that if other races are making their way into popular culture, they should be allowed to be people, and not labels. Asians aren’t all responsible, good with numbers and close ranks around their own kind. Indians aren’t enlightened, mystical, polite and proper professionals with racial superiority complexes. If nothing else, Harold & Kumar Go To White Castle shows us that Indians and Asians are sex-obsessed, chemically-twisted, immoral, troublemaking morons like everybody else. Indeed, they too “get stoned, dude!”

The premise is simple enough: Harold, a Korean office drone and Kumar, an Indian slacker and would-be med student have, after getting “seriously baked,” come down with the munchies and decide the only cure is 30 or so White Castle “sliders” or mini-burgers that, one can assume, “slide” right through your lower colon.

Their quest is the stuff of numerous marijuana clouded films: they cannot find their treasure because of conspiring fate or drug-induced paranoia, incompetence and need, nevertheless will not abandon their quest, and will cross paths with a parade of celebrity cameos who may help them marginally, do nothing, impede their progress, but will invariably manage to freak out our dopey heroes. The ‘plot’ is little more than a train of gags, hammered together by what charitably could be called ‘editing.’ Most of the jokes, which are predictably top-heavy with the scatological, are least close to being humorous, and even manage to muster up a few laughs. Neil Patrick Harris’s self-deprecating cameo as a tweaking-from-ecstacy former child star is – God help me – quite funny.

The thing that makes the film work, what answers the question posed above, is its self-awareness. Harold and Kumar are not white, and they know it. They worry that their communities think their bucking of their respective traditions is acceptance of the dominant, white American hegemony. Harold frets over calling an Asian girl, sure that his constant reluctance to engage in Asian-American student association functions will label him a “Twinkie.” Kumar is not the good little Indian boy, but locks horns with a hideous cackle of ‘extreme’ white kids, is repulsed by their antics and finally relieved when he realizes what they are.

Yet they still chose to expend as much as effort as they can getting baked and finding those little burgers. A wholesome American activity, carried about non-traditional Americans, in manner that is assured, relaxed and funny. Cho and Penn are the stars, and are not that way because one is good at martial arts and the other at driving a cab. There is no doubt that Harold & Kumar Go To White Castle is a stoner comedy whose core intention is to make its audience laugh. But one can’t help but think that there is at least a glimmer of intent by the filmmakers, a call for recognition and acceptance, and a reconsideration by Western cinema.