Dirs: Jon Hurwitz & Hayden Schlossberg . US. 2008. 101 mins.

2004's Harold & Kumar Go To White Castle was such a pleasant surprise - a witty stoner comedy with some depth and genuine laughs - that it was perhaps too much to hope that the sequel could retain the original's spark. Alas, while not without its funny moments, the laboured Harold & Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay ups the nudity and gross-out factor of the relatively tame original while diminishing the sweetness and evident camaraderie of its appealing leads.

Guantanamo Bay will target the non-PC crowd on its US release (April 25), looking to improve on the box office of the low-budget 2004 original ($18m in the US and just over $5.5m internationally). Considering that White Castle proved to be a strong rental, and that co-star Kal Penn has recently boosted his profile with Superman Returns and Epic Movie, Guantanamo Bay looks set to achieve this goal. Interestingly, since White Castle's release, two likeminded buddy sex-comedies have found huge riches: 2005's Wedding Crashers ($209m) and last summer's Superbad ($121m). Ancillaries will best serve this film, however, especially when the inevitable unrated DVD enters the market, although one shudders to think how much more vulgar that cut of the film could possibly be.

Picking up precisely where White Castle ended, Korean office drone Harold (John Cho) and Indian goof-off Kumar (Kal Penn) are flying to Amsterdam when authorities mistake Kumar's homemade bong for a terrorist's bomb. Racial profiling lands them in Guantanamo Bay, but they manage to escape, travelling across the American South in the hopes of contacting their college buddy whose government connections can clear their name - the same college buddy, ironically, who is about to marry Kumar's old girlfriend and true love (Danneel Harris).

By no means a classic, Harold & Kumar Go To White Castle deserved its cult status thanks to a consistently funny script, written by first-timers Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg, that subverted racial stereotypes by creating an authentic multicultural suburban stoner universe where whites, Jews, Indians, and Koreans endlessly cut each other down with playful back-and-forth barbs. Also critical to the film's success, relative newcomers Cho and Penn displayed a palpable comedic chemistry, with Cho's fussy Harold and Penn's zany Kumar believable best friends who could still drive each other nuts.

Hurwitz and Schlossberg not only wrote the sequel but also made it their directorial debut, and in both capacities they fail to give Guantanamo Bay sufficient comedic momentum. Disappointingly, Guantanamo Bay's comedic coarseness appears to be an attempt on the filmmakers' part to 'outdo' the first film's more shocking moments although, predictably, this time the calculatedly-outrageous sequences are so forced that they rarely rise above the merely off-putting.

In another dispiriting development, Harold and Kumar have misplaced their clever repartee, instead resorting to stale bickering matches that are largely plot-driven. Whether it's the Rush Hour trilogy or Lethal Weapon franchise, one of the worst by-products of comedy sequels is that the once-fresh tension between their mismatched leads slowly gives way to yelling and empty histrionics, and Guantanamo Bay dutifully follows down the same path.

Having less to work with this time around, Cho and Penn give subpar performances, but it's interesting that they both improve when they're not involved with the sequel's rampant bad-boy behaviour. Cho is charming while opening up to some scantily-clad prostitutes, and Penn displays a sweet charisma with Vanessa (Danneel Harris), his former flame, during a flashback to their first meeting. These brief heartfelt moments aren't any less funny because they're not vulgar, and it's a reminder of what made White Castle such a fun ride.

Production companies

Mandate Pictures

Kingsgate Films

New Line Cinema

Worldwide distribution

Warner Bros.

Producers

Greg Shapiro

Nathan Kahane

Screenplay

Jon Hurwitz

Hayden Schlossberg

(based on characters created by Jon Hurwitz & Hayden Schlossberg)

Director of photography

Daryn Okada

Production designer

Tony Fanning

Editor

Jeff Freeman

Music

George S. Clinton

Main cast:

John Cho

Kal Penn

Roger Bart

Rob Corddry

Neil Patrick Harris

David Krumholtz

Eddie Kaye Thomas

Jack Conley

Paul a Garces

Danneel Harris

Eric Winter