A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas review

Partners in getting high, getting the munchies, and getting wrongfully imprisoned in Cuban detention camps, Harold and Kumar are back

Wise old John Hurt recently revealed that when offered a new film role, he asks himself one question: will this succeed on the level it was intended? John Hurt isn’t in A Very Harold and Kumar 3D Christmas but by that logic, had he been asked, he’d have been forced to accept.

Because on the level it’s intended – tinselly stoner comedy - A Very Harold and Kumar 3D Christmas succeeds, and it does so with pizazz, a knowing wink, and a surprising amount of festive joy. The script may have its dull points, and the film won’t seduce anyone unwilling to laugh at knob gags and babies on coke, but on the level it’s intended, it’s a success.

The third Harold and Kumar feature picks up six years after the slacker pair’s last outing, and finds the two friends having drifted apart. Harold (John Cho) is now boasting a nice house and hot wife and doing very nicely for himself on Wall Street, while the recently dumped Kumar (Kal Penn) is in arrested development, whiling his days away getting high in the apartment he once shared with Harold.

A strange sequence of events thrusts the old pals back together in a Christmas Eve adventure which sees Harold searching for the perfect 12ft fir tree with which to impress his disapproving Mexican father-in-law (Danny Trejo working that handlebar moustache overtime).

After receiving some life-changing news of his own, Kumar attempts to take some adult responsibility of his own, but unsurprisingly his plans go awry. Cue a drink-spiking, high-kicking, gangster-kidnapping, blunt-smoking, Santa-shooting festive trip. Add to that a Community-alike Claymation sequence and more racially insensitive cultural stereotypes than you can jab a candy cane at, and you’ve got yourself a surprisingly fun Christmas movie.

Neil Patrick Harris returns as the monstrous parallel universe version of his public persona, (only out of the closet for the poontang opportunities it affords him) and is used well in a good old-fashioned Christmas musical spectacular. Sad though it may be to admit, watching a crack-smoking Doogie Howser perform a medley of festive hits whilst jizzing glitter out of an enormous candy cane is actually the closest I’ve come to feeling Christmassy this year.

A Very Harold and Kumar 3D Christmas conjures up not a small amount of festive spirit in fact, much of it courtesy of the kind of soundtrack you’ll be able to hear in department stores around the country from October to January. That it looks like pretty much every Christmas film ever made thanks to a shedload of shots of a fairy light-festooned New York doesn’t hurt the jingle bells factor either.

There are a couple of important ways though in which A Very Harold and Kumar 3D Christmas stands out from the rest of the Xmas movie genre. The first is that its script and sense of humour clearly reside happily in the gutter, and the second is the film’s use of 3D.

A Very Harold and Kumar 3D Christmas has to include the most knowing use of 3D since stereoscopy once again became the cool new thing. Most films will sell their use of 3D on the idea of immersion, that the spectating experience will be that much more immersive because of the trick, but not this film. This movie isn’t just in 3D, it’s an extended parody of the conventions of 3D filmmaking.

With films such as Pina, Cave of Forgotten Dreams, and even Hugo getting the grown-ups to accept that there might be more to stereoscopy than the novelty of having stuff poked in your face, A Very Harold and Kumar 3D Christmas cheerfully takes things one step backwards, sending up 3D as a gimmick whilst gleefully poking stuff in your face. And seeing as it’s a Harold and Kumar picture, you can imagine much of what you’re being poked with…

We may have seen Christmas filth done before in Bad Santa but without the zaniness or knowing winks that Harold and Kumar bring to proceedings. There’s a little bit of heart involved too, with the film’s slight but touching story about a friendship growing apart. The characters’ creators, Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg, have since co-written and directed American Reunion, and this film is a warm-up for that one in many ways, providing a chance for the duo to flex their gross-out-meets-ageing-friendship story muscles.

“See you in the fourth one” winks the evil version of Neil Patrick Harris as he bids adieu in A Very Harold and Kumar 3D Christmas, and on the basis of all this harmless fun, you could do worse than to join them.