MOVIE REVIEW 'Harold & amp; Kumar' flops despite diversity factor

The lead players create chemistry, but that doesn't help the weak material.
By DAVID GERMAIN
ASSOCIATED PRESS
What a strange land is Hollywood, where it's a step forward in cultural diversity to feature lead characters of Asian and Indian descent as randy marijuana tokers with a wicked case of the munchies.
"Harold & amp; Kumar Go to White Castle" presents its leads as plain old Americans defined not by ethnicity but by the same broad influences as everyone else.
That's a good thing as far as it goes, to offer up minority faces as mainstream protagonists. The title characters behave like any pleasure-seeking young white or black goofballs would act in a gross-out comedy, and maybe that's a good thing, too.
But "Harold & amp; Kumar" is still a bad movie, despite its amiably moronic tone and the nice chemistry of lead players John Cho as junior investment banker Harold and Kal Penn as Kumar, a potential med-school prodigy living the slacker's life.
Director Danny Leiner wallows in the same infantile turf as his mini-hit "Dude, Where's My Car?" With smarts and lucidity, Harold and Kumar are a cut above the stoner pals of "Dude," but Leiner and screenwriters Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg put them through a mostly witless rigamarole of pratfalls, shallow jokes and rank sight gags strung along a meager plot.
What happens
After a rough week at the office, Harold settles in for a Friday night weed high with roomie Kumar. Hunger inevitably strikes, and while they debate what to eat, a White Castle commercial comes on the tube, flashing images of those miniature hamburgers the restaurant chain's enthusiasts affectionately call "sliders."
Off our heroes drive, through the wilds of New Jersey, in search of a White Castle that grows ever more elusive as obstacles foil Harold and Kumar's quest.
Here and there, the movie rises to freshness, notably in Kumar's fantasy-sequence romance with a Hefty-bag-sized sack of marijuana and a satiric segment in which Harold encounters an upstanding black man gracefully resigned to civil-rights violations by white cops.
Mostly, though, "Harold & amp; Kumar" languishes in coarse bathroom humor and repetitive drug jokes. White Castle gave the project its blessing, begging the question, did anyone there read the script?
Cho and Penn demonstrate charm and assurance, despite the weak material. The rest of the cast ranges from forgettable to torturous.
Fred Willard's great comic talents go to waste in a bit part as a medical college interviewer. David Krumholtz and Eddie Kaye Thomas as Harold and Kumar's neighbors and Paula Garces as Harold's dream girl barely register, their roles are so insubstantial.
In a noxious small role, Christopher Meloni has the good fortune of being unrecognizable behind his makeup as a pustule-coated Bible-thumper who stops to lend roadside assistance to our heroes.
And what was Neil Patrick Harris ("Doogie Howser, M.D.") thinking, signing on to play himself as an abrasive party animal and sex fiend who hitches a ride with Harold and Kumar after a wild Ecstasy trip?