A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas | Film review

It probably won’t last—not with new features from Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg on the horizon—but for the moment, A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas is the season’s finest stereoscopic offering. This gleefully anarchic waft of, um, fresh air goes for broke with its projectile effects, threatening to leave your eyes bloodshot in more ways than one.

The first installment—“the pot odyssey gone melting pot,” in critic Dennis Lim’s immortal coinage—was credited with democratizing the stoner-comedy genre. Revving the draggy pace of part two’s trip to Guantanamo, H&K’s latest journey puts its politics up front. Harold (John Cho) now works on Wall Street, and the first of several well-aimed salvos places former Princeton party-animal Ken Park (Bobby Lee) in the path of egg-hurling protesters.

Meanwhile, Kumar (Kal Penn) grapples with deferred adulthood, until the arrival of a mysterious giant doobie at his doorstep inspires him to reunite with his old friend. An accident involving said magic joint burns down a beloved Christmas tree that Harold’s tough-love father-in-law (Danny Trejo) could (and does) splooge over, igniting a night-long tree-replacement quest that incorporates mobsters, an epic Beirut match, a coked-up toddler, Claymation, Santa and, of course, Neil Patrick Harris. The franchise’s essentially generous spirit hasn’t been tempered so much as reoriented in its class satire and oral-anal fixations. (A wealthy gangster’s daughter steps in for tow-truck driver Freakshow’s horny wife; battleshits have been replaced with Wafflebots.) Mostly, it’s just refreshing to see a comedy so blunt in its intentions.