Drug humor is alive but not so well for 'Harold & Kumar'

It's hard to believe that for a long stretch of the '90s and into the new millennium, the "Just Say No" and other citizen campaigns of the war on drugs managed to totally eradicate stoned humor from Hollywood studio films. But that's all ancient history.

Marijuana is the comic relief of just about every Hollywood movie with an R-rating these days and, for better or worse (depending on how you feel about the benefits or pitfalls of cannabis), it's almost always presented in a mildly approving way.

This neo-drug humor is the whole motif of New Line's "Harold & Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay," the second outing (after 2004's "Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle") of a comedy duo that's out to be their movie generation's Cheech and Chong.

In this episode, the two potheads (John Cho and Kal Penn) find themselves branded as terrorists and thrown into the Guantanamo prison facility after Kumar's (Penn) drug paraphernalia is mistaken for a bomb on a flight to Amsterdam.

They immediately escape and the movie follows their flight to Texas, where they hope a politically powerful friend can exonerate them. Along the way they're aided by a mushroom-munching Neil Patrick Harris (playing himself) and have other high times.

In the script's funniest scene, they parachute into the Texas ranch of George W. Bush (John Adomian), who turns out to be a big dope smoker himself and a regular guy who'd love to legalize drugs if he wasn't the prisoner of his father and Dick Cheney.

The other gag running through the farce is a paranoid reaction that has the ethnic pair (Harold is Korean and Kumar is Indian) constantly butting heads with white racism. With only one exception, every white male they encounter is a monster from hell.

The movie is sporadically funny in an anarchistic way. But Cho and Penn don't have the needed personality or comic identity to sustain a franchise and their non-drug humor is so crude and scatological that -- to say the least -- it leaves a very bad taste in the mouth.