April 26, 2008 | When Stanley Kubrick unleashed Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb  in 1964, during the heyday of Cold War, not all moviegoers were amused. Bosley Crowther of The New York Times damned the dark comedy as “malefic and sick,” if not downright un-American, for daring to satirize U. S. military and military leaders charged with maintaining civil defense against the Soviet Union. The Washington Post reviewer went even further in an angrier tirade: “No Communist could dream of a more effective anti-American film to spread abroad.”

So I can’t help wondering: Forty-four years after the release of Kubrick’s classic, will Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay, a much cruder but similarly irreverent farce, generate the same sort of incensed outrage among those who insist that certain things simply shouldn’t be joked about?

That may seem like absurd question to raise about a boisterously crude stoner comedy that panders for shamelessly cheap laughs with brazenly gratuitous nudity and sniggering sexual activity. (At one point, Harold and Kumar, the mild-and-hazy heroes of the piece, visit a party where beautiful women cavort in “bottomless” –- not topless – fashion.) But consider this: The new movie, a bolder and funnier follow-up to Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle (2004), infuses party-hearty anarchy with seriocomic moral outrage. Over the top and beyond political correctness, it’s a sex-drugs-and-rock ’n’ roll comedy that jeeringly razzes post-9/11 paranoia, the entire concept of extraordinary rendition, and the authoritarian excesses of agencies charged with waging The War on Terror.

Call it Dr. Strangelove meets Animal House, and you won’t be far off the mark. Except that even Kubrick might have thought twice about attempting a scene like the one here in which an insanely overzealous Dept. of Homeland Security chief literally wipes his backside -– a not-terribly-clean backside, by the way -– with the Bill of Rights.

Much like its 2004 predecessor, Guantanamo Bay is a kinda-sorta road movie, with Harold (John Cho) and Kumar (Kal Penn), twentysomething buddies with drastically dissimilar degrees of ambition, setting out on a cross-country quest fueled by their taste for Cannabis. The big difference this time is that, instead of seeking a beloved burger joint, Harold and Kumar are running for their lives. After being mistaken for terrorists while aboard an Amsterdam-bound plane, and then shipped off to a detention camp at Guantanamo Bay, they miraculously escape and flee to Florida. From there, however, they must journey to Texas and make contact with Harold’s politically well-connected former classmate (Eric Winter) -– who just happens to be preparing his wedding to Kumar’s former sweetheart (Danneel Harris).

Ron Fox (Rob Corddry), the aforementioned Homeland Security chief with the personal hygiene problems, leads the massive manhunt for the fugitives. He assumes the duo represents a link to a new nexus of al-Qaeda and North Korean terrorists. (Never mind that the “bomb” Harold and Kumar brought aboard the plane actually was Kumar’s custom-made bong.) And he’s so single-mindedly relentless in his pursuit that it takes a Presidential proclamation -- in a manner of speaking -- to tip the balance in the favor of our relatively harmless “heroes.”  

Fox (hilariously played by Corddry as a live-action cartoon) isn’t the only target for the movie’s sledgehammering satire. Radical Muslim terrorists, in-bred Deep Southerners, self-absorbed stoners, racial-profiling airport-security guards and President George W. Bush (a surprisingly benign burlesque by a well-cast James Adomian) also receive a fair share abuse from writer-directors Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg, a pair of equal-opportunity offenders. And fans of the original Harold & Kumar comedy will bed pleased to know that Neil Patrick Harris has returned to trash himself as a drug-addledsexaholic who exploits his Doogie Howser fame at every opportunity.

Truth to tell, the majority of the jokes in Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay are apolitical. But there’s just enough fear and loathing percolating beneath the madcap zaniness to indicate that the filmmakers have not even begun to stop worrying and love the status quo. Even while they play for laughs, they play for keeps.