‘I shot Santa in the face! He’s real! And I shot him in the face…’
I was 17 and very much the target audience when Harold & Kumar Get the Munchies came out in 2004. Along with films like Road Trip, Old School and Van Wilder, Harold & Kumar was a bit of a cult classic among my friendship circle. My wolf pack. I was interested to see if I could once again be excited by the antics of a pair of stoners as a thirty-one-year-old man. It turns out I kinda can..
Harold (John Cho) and Kumar (Kal Penn) have seen their lives take very different paths since we last caught up with them in Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay. While Kumar remains the ultimate stoner, ‘Roldy has found himself in a beautiful house with a beautiful wife, no doubting asking himself, ‘how did I get here?’
LETTING THE DAYS GO BY, LET THE WATER HOLD ME DOWN…
What’s happening again? Oh yeah, Harold and Kumar. With Harold’s terrifying stepfather (Danny Trejo) in town, things take a turn for the worst when Harold and Kumar are reunited amid difficult circumstances.
I don’t care for stoner humour but, weirdly, I love Kevin Smith and I really enjoyed the first two H & K movies. And I also quite enjoyed this one. With the, no doubt, syrupy The Christmas Chronicles coming up, it is quite refreshing to take in a film where one of the running gags is a toddler accidentally taking drugs. A white Christmas indeed.
These films are underpinned by the chemistry shared by Penn and Cho so if you don’t buy into that, there is nothing for you here. If you can embrace the offensive humour, the shitty 3D and the predictable plotting however, A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas is actually lots of fun.
Being the third best Harold & Kumar movie is nothing to be proud of, but being a genuinely (and intentionally) funny Christmas movie is a rarity. And a welcome one at that.