Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle

Danny Leiner’s previous film, Dude, Where’s My Car? (2000), was about two idiots looking for something. This one is about two clever men looking for something, and the difference turns out to be most of what matters. Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle is a stoner comedy in the Cheech and Chong line, 88 minutes long, built around one night’s drive across New Jersey for a bag of small square hamburgers. It has an idea the genre had not tried: its heroes are a Korean-American and an Indian-American, and the film is about how everybody else notices that before they notice anything else. It is good. It is also crude in ways that do not help it, and it is far more interested in race than in anything else, including women.

John Cho plays Harold as a man who has said yes to every imposition in his life and is still waiting to be thanked for it. His colleagues dump their weekend work on him because they assume the quiet Asian analyst will take it, and he does. Kal Penn’s Kumar has the opposite problem: he is plainly brilliant, could be a doctor tomorrow, and would rather set fire to the interview than give his father the satisfaction. The pair argue like a married couple, and the script by Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg gives every stranger they meet a theory about them. The punks who harass them cannot work out which country to insult. The joke is never that Harold and Kumar are Asian. The joke is the people who think that is the joke.

The road takes in a Princeton campus, a raccoon, an emergency room, a boil-covered stranger called Freakshow (Christopher Meloni) and his wife Liane (Malin Akerman), and Neil Patrick Harris as a version of himself we will leave you to meet. Not all of it lands. The Freakshow stretch goes on a minute past its best gag, and the Princeton lavatory scene, which puts Christy (Kate Kelton) and Clarissa (Brooke D’Orsay) in adjacent cubicles for a contest we will not describe, made us laugh and then wish we had not. Ryan Reynolds has two minutes as a nurse and uses every second of them.

We laughed hardest in the hospital. Kumar, who has spent the whole film refusing to be a doctor, is handed the instruments and turns out to be superb, and Penn plays him as a man furious at how much he is enjoying it. It is a joke and a piece of character at the same time, which the film does not often manage, and it told us more about Kumar than any of his speeches. Harris got us too, for reasons that have nothing to do with craft and everything to do with nerve.

Leiner directs flatly. Bruce Douglas Johnson shoots the night like a car advert, orange streetlamps and clean faces, and nothing in the frame cost more than it had to. Jeff Betancourt keeps every episode short, which rescues two or three that would have died at full length. David Kitay’s score hums under the driving and stays out of the dialogue, which is the right call. Steve Rosenzweig’s one piece of design that matters is the restaurant itself, which appears in adverts and daydreams lit like a chapel. Alex Kavanagh keeps Harold in his office shirt and tie all night, so he looks like a man who has not been allowed to stop working, which is what he is.

Two things count against it. The film is also an 88-minute advertisement for a hamburger chain and does not pretend otherwise. And Maria (Paula Garcés), the neighbour Harold cannot speak to, has about four lines and a lift to stand in. She is a prize, like the burgers. The neighbours Goldstein (David Krumholtz) and Rosenberg (Eddie Kaye Thomas), off on a hot dog errand of their own, get more to do than she does.

Cheech and Chong’s films were about being stoned. This one is about two stoned men trying to get somewhere, and that gives it a spine the genre usually lacks. It reached British cinemas on 4 March 2005 with a 15 certificate. Watch it late, with company, and with food in the house, because by the end you will want some.