Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle Review

The thing people forget is how tightly this is built. It is a classical odyssey: a stated goal, a chain of obstacles escalating in absurdity, a hero who has to become slightly less of a coward before he can reach the end. Eighty-eight minutes, no fat on it. What separates the film from everything else in its moment is that John Cho and Kal Penn are playing specific people rather than types, an investment banker who cannot speak up in a meeting and a medical school candidate refusing the career his father chose, and the slights they absorb are treated as friction with real weight instead of material.

The Neil Patrick Harris casting is a genuinely strange idea that reset an entire career. Danny Leiner shoots it functionally and a few set pieces have aged badly, the extreme sports detour in particular. But the cheetah ride is exactly as stupid as it needs to be, and the last scene, where Harold finally says the thing out loud, is earned by ninety minutes of him not saying it.