Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle: Critic Reviews

[Harold and Kumar] share a quality the overgrown adolescents in films like this are never allowed to possess: They're witty, focused, and highly aware.

Attacks of hunger and indigestion, comic hallucinations and episodes of flat-out insensibility are scrambled together on this goofy roller coaster ride of dope.

This is one more 'youth movie' that'll put years on anyone over 25.

A peppy, satisfying comedy that could soon become a minor classic.

Will seem a classic if you're stoned, and only slightly less funny if you're straight.

Silliness is the movie's only ambition, but there's something mind-blowing about seeing a fratty comedy through two pairs of Asian-American eyes, particularly when those eyes belong to actors who were token minorities in other dumb comedies.

Winds up a sweetly nonchalant and excellently unwhiny allegory of seeking and gaining entry to the Caucasian fortress that is present-day America, or at least nocturnal New Jersey.

The laugh ratio in this run-on of skits is pretty low, at least to the unaltered mind of one who's seen enough of these films and eaten enough White Castle burgers to last a lifetime.

This gonzo ganja comedy is propelled more by sly charm, sharp wit and stinging social satire than by mere smoke jokes.

In those rare instances when it's not being a dumb comedy, Harold and Kumar is a rather crafty satire of racial stereotypes (which, it must be said, traffics in a few stereotypes of its own).

Perfectly paired, John Cho and Kal Penn take the stereotypes of the brilliant Asian and the genius Indian for a joyride.

One secret of fiction is the creation of unique characters who are precisely defined. The secret of comedy is the same, with the difference being that the characters must be obsessed with unwholesome but understandable human desires.

Just as Mike Judge's Office Space has become an anthem for all us Gen X cubicle slaves, Harold and Kumar will resonate deeply with anyone who attended high school in the 1990s and at least saw a joint.

A laugh-out-loud if not-exactly-good stoner comedy.

It does have one thing on its side: It's freakin' hilarious, man.

What could have just pushed the usual youth comedy buttons is instead a crafty spoof on issues from racial politics to American highway monoculture that belies its cover (and marketing) as only a dumb gross-out laffer.

The most gut-bustingly funny movie so far this year.

Crude, tasteless, sophomoric and crass. It is also, sometimes, funny.

If it's possible for a movie to be sly and full-on raunchy at the same time, Danny Leiner's p.o.v.-shifting stoner-buddy comedy is it.

Plays it a little too safe and hackneyed with the comedy, but the characters and the talented actors who play them are a refreshing change of pace that make the movie feel like a minor buddy-comedy revolution.

Stretches the boundaries of offensiveness in ways that both make us laugh and make us think.

A blissfully silly, character-driven road movie with impressive laugh-per-minute performance specs.

A multilayered goof on ethnic stereotypes...

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.

Extremely dumb and vulgar comedy; not for kids.