After James Cameron revolutionized the 3-D process with “Avatar,” every major studio dumped a big, self-serious, three-dimensional popcorn epic into theaters, determined that every bit of action needed to be flung into the stadium seating. “A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas” is the long-awaited rejoinder to all those bloated event movies: An enthusiastically stupid comedy that makes the most of its technology in the service of a barrage of inventive sight gags.
Those who take “enthusiastically stupid” as cutting criticism miss the point, because in the third installment of the “Harold & Kumar” series, the only stupidity worth having is the enthusiastic kind. The good news is that the slack tedium of 2008's “Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay” is gone, replaced by a barrage of bad behavior and the constant prospect of a character flinging an egg or a beer pong ball into the theater or exhaling a ribbon of slightly green smoke into the faces in the audience. The bad news is that “A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas” suffers from an uneven distribution of the good stuff, whereas 2004's “Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle” still reigns as one of the best comedies in the stoner subgenre, behind “The Big Lebowski” and well ahead of all Cheech and Chong films — even “Up in Smoke.”
“Christmas” takes place six years after “Guantanamo Bay,” and Harold and Kumar aren't the inseparable heroes they once were. Harold (John Cho) is now a Wall Street banker who has to worry about getting pelted with eggs whenever he leaves his office for the suburbs (screenwriters Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg should receive an award for prescient scripting on that one). Meanwhile, Kumar (Kal Penn) has broken up with Vanessa (Danneel Harris), failed a urinalysis for a hospital position and is bonging his life away in a pizza box-filled apartment and rooming with an inferior dweeb named Adrian (Amir Blumenfeld, a dead ringer for a young Ira Glass).
There is no movie if the boys don't get back together, so a fateful Christmas package must be delivered, and the result is a series of misadventures involving Christmas trees, the daughter of a notorious Russian mobster (Elias Koteas), a toddler getting a jump start on her college-age party regimen, and of course, the illustrious Neil Patrick Harris.
As usual, Harris is the designated hitter — his arrival comes during an extravaganza of Christmas-themed Broadway badness, and it gives “A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas” an adrenaline shot just when the film needs it. For those unfamiliar with the legend, “White Castle” portrayed Harris as the antithesis of his true self, an over-the-top womanizer with a nose full of drugs and a mean criminal streak. The first “Harold & Kumar” comedy to be made since Harris came out as gay, “Christmas” finds a clever way to work that reality into this “Bizarro World” depiction of the star.
None of these films would work if both Harold and Kumar weren't such nice, relatable characters: If they were maniacally grinning madmen like Stifler from the “American Pie” franchise, no one would want to spend 90 minutes with these guys. They smoke a lot of marijuana and their emotional development peaked at age 14, but it makes sense that their sidekick in “A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas” is Wafflebot, a toy that operates a little like a cute Roomba dispensing waffles, syrup and good tidings. Sure, the movie is often too coarse and nasty for its own good, but Harold and Kumar are all about the love.
If the whole Wafflebot concept sounds stupid, don't forget — “A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas” is enthusiastically stupid: After all, Harold and Kumar hallucinate that they have become perversely Claymated after drinking eggnog spiked with belladonna root. And it's not a great comedy — up until Harris' appearance, first-time director Todd Strauss-Schulson seems to be huffing and puffing to make it all work. But then it all falls into place and it's as if Wafflebot just gave all the arrested-adolescent fans an extra helping of the maple.