Still, if you can accept the fact that these guys are risking their lives, careers and futures for some poorly cooked sliders then you’ll laugh at Danny Leiner’s Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle. The hit-to-miss ratio of the gags is somewhere around 65/35, with most of the best material stuffed in the first and last fifteen minutes. The middle stretches are filled with bizarre episodic adventures that range from mildly amusing to completely devoid of humor.

The setup is promising. Harold (John Cho, the “MILF” guy from the American Pies) is an uptight investment banker living in Hoboken, NJ. His roommate is Kumar (Kal Penn) a slacker whose intentionally botches med school interviews his surgeon father arranges for him. After a long Friday, they two get high and then decide there is only one food choice that will satisfy their munchies: White Castle. These scenes showcase the strong rapport between Cho and Penn and a script by first-timers Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg that is keenly attuned to the mind of the horny early-20’s male. I’ve heard some of these words - like the ones about Katie Holmes’ nude scene in the otherwise unremarkable The Gift - come out of my own mouth. The duo can’t convince their Jewish neighbors Goldstein and Rosenberg (who turn a shofar into a bong) to tag along, so they set out on their own for a White Castle they believe exists in New Brunswick.

So far, so good, and the fun continues into the duo’s first couple of adventures: with a clerk at an inferior burger joint who is well aware his product is second-rate next to White Castle and is willing to burn down his restaurant to prove it; and an ingenious jab at cruddy Newark, NJ, where Harold and Kumar accidentally enter, only to immediately witness a savage beating and robbery. Hurwitz and Schlossberg’s script is steeped in the milieu of late night suburban boredom, and they ring true to the New Jersey I knew growing up there. Still, their New Jersey isn’t completely accurate. Just off the Parkway, Harold and Kumar’s Jersey gets a little too tropical, and I’ve never seen any cliffs in the Garden State like the one they nearly drive off late in the film.

The NJ infidelity doesn’t bother me, but the endless diversions that are hatched up to keep our heroes away from their treasured hamburgers grow tiresome. In the worst, their disabled vehicle is toed by a bald, boil-covered Jesus-loving weirdo named - get this - Freakshow. It gets stranger too; Freakshow’s got a gorgeous nympho wife (Malin Akerman) who comes on Harold and Kumar while he fixes their car. There isn’t a laugh amongst any of this stuff even though Freakshow is played by Christopher Meloni, the comedic MVP of the absurdist classic Wet Hot American Summer. Excising the whole sequence would strengthen the movie’s pacing, and it was probably only kept in because it contains Harold and Kumar’s sole glimpse of the female anatomy.

It’s great to see a mainstream Hollywood film starring Asian and Indian actors instead of a bunch of white ones. Harold and Kumar makes the most of its cast, promoting racial diversity and denouncing white racism, even taking some very canny jabs at law enforcement’s pervasive racial profiling. It uses its tolerance theme as a frequent source of comedy (a bunch of “x-treme” and x-tremely white posers hound our heroes), and proudly proclaims itself as a forward thinking comedy. Why, then, does it has such little respect for women? Akerman’s there solely to flash her boobs, and Harold and Kumar are guilty of calling women by all sorts of derogatory terms throughout. I expect as much from your average stoner comedy, but not from one that claims to be so interested in equality.