Ho ho ho … John Cho and Kal Penn as Harold & Kumar. Photo: Darren Michaels
A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas does to the conventional Christmas movie what Hitler and Stalin did to Poland, except that this time it's a good thing. And it's about time. The Multiplex Christmas Experience has for years now been one of the defacing hallmarks of the season to be jolly, and the parade of horrors is long and deep. Recently we've endured Fred Claus and Four Christmases – both starring the Republican Vince Vaughn, evidently intent on foiling the imaginary war on Christmas singlehandedly – and Affleck and Gandolfini in Surviving Christmas (of which there were, alas, no known survivors), but the rot goes way back. Is anyone nostalgic for Schwarzenegger and Sinbad in Jingle All The Way, or Tim Allen in The Santa Clause?
Confronted with such miserable birthday offerings, What Would Baby Jesus Do? I'll tell you: he'd throw up all over the Three Wise Men and bawl for his Bad Santa DVD. But this year will be different because Harold and Kumar's third outing is a magnificent psychedelic pop-up card of a Christmas movie – glitter and tinsel everywhere, party streamers, candy canes and all the paraphernalia of the consumer-driven lunacy and tempestuous familial strife that is the holidays – and blessed with the wittiest and crudest 3D effects in ages.
With goodwill to all men is how Harold and Kumar greet most people. Most of their antagonists, however scary or violent, are disarmed by the stonily perplexed "What is this shit?" attitude the duo adopt with every weirdo they encounter. Harold, now a bourgeois suburbanite, must appease his Korean-hating father-in-law Danny Trejo (magnificent in a Christmas jumper that should be taken out behind the barn and shot); while Kumar, still mired in Stonerland, must make good with his angry and now pregnant ex. All their relationships and friendships are inter-ethnic or trans-tribal or both, and the pair happily somersault into all kinds of racial minefields. After many a joyously profane and filthy outburst and incident – including a claymation hallucination scene featuring an eye-popping appendage – it also all ends heartwarmingly well for a hard R-rated comedy.
Better than all that, though, is that this is a movie in which Santa gets shot out of the sky by our heroes; a three-year-old accidentally ingests pot, coke and E and loves it all; and gay icon Neil Patrick Harris (or the super-straight, frighteningly cocksure H&K alternate-universe version thereof), disses Jesus big-time to His face, and later brazenly admits that he just uses "this homo shit" to cover up the fact that he's a rabid "cooze-hound". It's a film that's afloat on a cloud of pot smoke and bottomless scatology but still somehow happens to embody – to an almost Norman Rockwell 1954 degree – the remains of that oft-mourned "spirit of Christmas".
Confronted with such miserable birthday offerings, What Would Baby Jesus Do? I'll tell you: he'd throw up all over the Three Wise Men and bawl for his Bad Santa DVD. But this year will be different because Harold and Kumar's third outing is a magnificent psychedelic pop-up card of a Christmas movie – glitter and tinsel everywhere, party streamers, candy canes and all the paraphernalia of the consumer-driven lunacy and tempestuous familial strife that is the holidays – and blessed with the wittiest and crudest 3D effects in ages.
With goodwill to all men is how Harold and Kumar greet most people. Most of their antagonists, however scary or violent, are disarmed by the stonily perplexed "What is this shit?" attitude the duo adopt with every weirdo they encounter. Harold, now a bourgeois suburbanite, must appease his Korean-hating father-in-law Danny Trejo (magnificent in a Christmas jumper that should be taken out behind the barn and shot); while Kumar, still mired in Stonerland, must make good with his angry and now pregnant ex. All their relationships and friendships are inter-ethnic or trans-tribal or both, and the pair happily somersault into all kinds of racial minefields. After many a joyously profane and filthy outburst and incident – including a claymation hallucination scene featuring an eye-popping appendage – it also all ends heartwarmingly well for a hard R-rated comedy.
Better than all that, though, is that this is a movie in which Santa gets shot out of the sky by our heroes; a three-year-old accidentally ingests pot, coke and E and loves it all; and gay icon Neil Patrick Harris (or the super-straight, frighteningly cocksure H&K alternate-universe version thereof), disses Jesus big-time to His face, and later brazenly admits that he just uses "this homo shit" to cover up the fact that he's a rabid "cooze-hound". It's a film that's afloat on a cloud of pot smoke and bottomless scatology but still somehow happens to embody – to an almost Norman Rockwell 1954 degree – the remains of that oft-mourned "spirit of Christmas".
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