Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay (2008)

Two stoners, one smokeless bong, and a Homeland Security official who mistakes it for a bomb. The sequel to Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle drags its heroes from a New Jersey apartment to Guantanamo Bay and back, and along the way it commits the sort of comedy that ages in interesting ways. John Cho and Kal Penn anchor a mainstream studio picture as two Asian-American leads in 2008, a fact that drew no comment then and reads as quietly ahead of its time now. The supporting cast folds South Asian and Black characters into the road-trip machinery without ceremony, which is its own small achievement in a genre that rarely bothered.

The film's true target is post-9/11 racial panic. Rob Corddry's Deputy Secretary Ron Fox is a cartoon of state racism, and the screenplay lets him interrogate suspects by asking whether they prefer salsa or ketchup. A KKK rally, a Birmingham neighborhood that offers help, an inbred family in the woods, and a brothel detour follow in grim procession. The jokes are crude, the women are props, and the attempted assault at the detention camp is played for shock. None of that constitutes a feminist statement, and the movie would be baffled by the suggestion.

What lingers is a single moment near the end, when an NSA official tells Fox that men like him are why the world thinks Americans are racist and stupid. It arrives like a sermon at a keg party, briefly sober, then gone. The rest is bongs and Bush, who pardons the pair after a smoke on his ranch. A curious artifact, then: a broad comedy that stumbled into saying something and immediately apologized with a genital joke.