MOVIE REVIEW

Gross-out jokes abound, but the main characters work like a veteran comedy team.

By Kevin Crust, Times Staff Writer

Buried deep (very, very deep) beneath the scatological and pharmacological surfaces of the burger comedy "Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle" is a smarter movie, one in which the humor is rooted in character and not bodily fluids.

Sure, it's a typically idiotic, gross-out, R-rated movie aimed at 15-year-old boys, featuring a pair of guys obsessively pursuing an object of banal desire, but there is also something more.

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It's there, but you have to look closely and quickly or you'll miss it.

It's there in the way the leads, John Cho ("Better Luck Tomorrow") and Kal Penn ("Malibu's Most Wanted"), play off each other with the timing of a veteran comedy team. It's there in the inside jokes that reference the actors' previous roles and the manner in which their characters' ethnicities are often (but not often enough) beside the point.

Cho plays Harold, a Korean American with a bottom-feeder job at an investment banking firm who routinely is taken advantage of by the slickster white dudes who work with him. His free-spirited roommate and best friend, Kumar (Penn), is an Indian American slacker bent on milking his doctor father's expectations of his carrying on the family medical tradition — even though he has no intention of actually attending medical school.

After Harold is manipulated into taking on some reports over the weekend that were supposed to have been done by a colleague (Ethan Embry), he and Kumar unwind by smoking pot and watching a little television. A White Castle commercial gives them an intense case of the munchies, a hunger that can be sated only by those little 3-inch-square mini-burgers known as slyders.

Into the night they go, scouring New Jersey for a White Castle location, which apparently do not exist in the abundance that one might assume. As they go from Princeton to Cherry Hill, covering the more rural portions of the Garden State, Harold and Kumar encounter all manner of wildlife, both foreign and domestic.

As the buttoned-down Harold, afraid of his own shadow and fearful of even jaywalking, Cho nicely bristles as a young man struggling with his own rigidity. He relies on Penn's Kumar to loosen him up, to get him to take a chance now and then. Penn's devil-may-care attitude comes in handy when working off amusing cameos by Fred Willard, Anthony Anderson, Ryan Reynolds, an unrecognizable Christopher Meloni and Neil Patrick Harris.

While the producers are to be commended for the insightful casting of Cho and Penn, and writers Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg deserve credit for writing two funny, intelligent characters who happen to be Asian, the film tries to have it both ways by using stereotypes for cheap laughs. While it's true the stereotypes (overly studious Asian nerds, an Indian convenience store proprietor, etc.) are introduced to be tweaked, the tweaking isn't really enough.

The audience still is laughing at these cliches and not necessarily noticing the difference in the usage. To be truly groundbreaking, the writers and director Danny Leiner needed to turn the stereotypes inside out without ambivalence and land their points (assuming they had some) more decisively.

If you replace Harold and Kumar with, say, David and Jason (as Hurwitz and Schlossberg feared might happen in the development process), you would have, essentially, Leiner's 2000 comedy, "Dude, Where's My Car?" That Cho and Penn are such likable actors and are so funny in their roles earns the movie more slack than it probably deserves and prevents it from being just another gross-out comedy.