By Geno McGahee
I don’t get Harold & Kumar and why this duo is so popular. This is the second film that I’ve seen concerning the characters and I wouldn’t say that the movie is bad, but I found very few laughs along the way. A lot of it surrounds marijuana use and I don’t smoke weed. So, maybe that’s why I’m missing the humor.
Harold (John Cho) is getting prepared for his marriage to Maria (Paula Garces), but he has to meet their family before Christmas. Her dad, Mr. Perez (Danny Trejo), shows up with the entire family and it’s not going well. Mr. Perez is not happy with Harold as the potential son-in-law and hates the fake tree that he has. They take it out of the house and bring in a family tree, which is the tradition. They go to midnight mass and leave Harold alone with the tree.
Kumar (Kal Penn) gets a delivery for Harold and brings it to his house after a long time of not seeing each other. Their friendship sort of evaporated because of Kumar’s drug usage. When they reunite and open the package, it’s a huge joint. When Kumar lights it, he accidentally burns down the tree and now they have to go on a hunt for a new tree to make Maria’s family happy.
In one of the funny moments of the film, there are two guys that own a Christmas tree farm and one of them wears a bad wig and a Bill Cosby sweater and plays the good guy while the other plays the thug. It didn’t make a lot of sense, but I found it pretty funny.
Kumar’s friend, Adrian (Amir Blumenfeld), met a girl on line and wants to meet her for sex. It just so happens that she has a big tree and Harold and his buddy, Todd (Thomas Lennon), agree to drive them over in order to get the tree and save Christmas. Todd’s young child is along for the ride and she immediately gets high on weed that Kumar smokes and that’s an ongoing joke in the film. The kid that is probably 2 years old at most is constantly on drugs. I don’t get the humor. I didn’t find it funny at all, but they really pushed it.
Everywhere they turn, the tree doesn’t work out. It turns out that the girl that Adrian was trying to meet up with was the daughter of a Russian mob boss and now they are being hunted by goons. Harold and Kumar start to realize that they are still friends and that they should not have ever lost contact.
A VERY HAROLD & KUMAR CHRISTMAS is watchable, but not very funny. The cast is very good but they don’t have a great deal to work with. Neil Patrick Harris was the best part of the film, but he’s barely in it. You can see that he really enjoyed the role and made the most of it, but other than that, there’s not much humor in this.
Maybe this is one of those films that you need to get high to really enjoy and I just don’t get it. I had high hopes that I would find a lot of amusement in this but it wasn’t there. I can’t recommend it, but maybe it’s just good and I miss the point.
