Film Review: Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantánamo Bay 7|8
Written and directed by Jon Hurwitz, Hayden Schlossberg
Starring John Cho, Kal Penn
Comedy, 2008. 102 minutes.
This film follows on the heels of Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle (2004), a slapstick comedy about two pot smoking twenty-somethings searching for adventure and good times in New Jersey. Escape from Guantánamo Bay picks up ten minutes after the first film ends as the two friends decide to travel Amsterdam to find Harold’s new flame. Their plan quickly goes awry when Kumar is unable to resist lighting up his bong in the bathroom of the airplane and the two are arrested as terrorists. They embark on an international adventure full of raunchy highjinx, screwball antics, and all the rest.
Go to White Castle broke new ground in American cinema by featuring Korean-American and Indian-American main characters. Escape from Guantánamo Bay pushes a whole lot further. What matters about this fiction is that it brings human rights issues into mainstream discourse - in a very funny way.
Without spoiling the movie, Harold and Kumar actually spend little time in Guantánamo Prison. But the rest of the film is a comedic exploration of Guantánamo’s meaning in American life. The lead government investigator, played by Rob Corddry, stupidly relies upon his own prejudices towards Koreans, Jews, blacks, and innocent mothers in order to hunt down the hapless fugitives. He uses a translator to speak with Korean-Americans, grape soda for African-Americans, pennies for Jews, and warns white Americans that terrorists will rape their children. But the racial profiling does nothing to help his investigation, and in interacting with these supposedly suspicious members of American society, Corddry unearths the pervading stereotypes that plague a cultural mosaic.
The Guantánamo Bay detention center was created in 2002 to detain unlawful enemy combatants in an institution that would not require the due process guaranteed by the U.S. constitution. The U.S. Supreme Court found the military tribunals unconstitutional in Hamden v. Rumsfeld (2006), but Congress soon legislated new tribunals in the Military Commissions Act of 2006. The prison’s ostensible goal is to hold terrorists accountable for their actions. But the institution has not achieved this aim for two reasons: (1) the lack of due process clouds any real reliability in an assessment of guilt; (2) data suggests the majority of prisoners were neither members of terrorist organizations nor committed any hostile act.
Harold and Kumar thankfully aren’t worried about the law, though, but scoring babes and getting high. But because the movie addresses human rights, it’s worth noting where it gets things wrong. Escape from Guantánamo Bay is clearly homophobic, relying upon cheap gay jokes, and the film is exploitative of women, with female characters that are either naked or woodenly submissive. And the movie also ignores that most inmates in Guantánamo Bay prison are just like Harold and Kumar. In Harold and Kumar’s short time in prison, other inmates admit to having committed acts of terrorism. Reports suggest that such prisoners would be very rare indeed - if they exist at all at Guantánamo. (One prisoner’s sole offense seems to have been serving food for the Taliban.)
Despite these shortcomings, the movie made me laugh. In fact, I laughed so hard that I clearly annoyed the rest of the people in the theatre. Kal Penn and John Cho nailed their comedic performances in what has become a classic duo. And the movie also made me realize that it’s possible to address human rights issues without being depressing, that low-brow comedy can be as equally effective as the most stark documentary. Do not go and see Harold & Kumar with your kids or your parents. But go see it.
–Deji Olukotun
Would you like to know more?
Check out the Seton Hall University Law Center’s Guantánamo project here.
Visit the ACLU’s new John Adams project, dedicated to justice at the military proceedings at Guantánamo here.
The Drug Policy Alliance, a progressive think-tank dedicated to intelligent, humane drug policy reform.
