The laughs go up in smoke in A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas

Whoa. When one dude smokes a fat joint in a mall parkade with another dude dressed like Santa Claus and the smoke puffs right off the screen and into your mouth, that’s awesome 3-D, dude. And how about when someone shoots a baggie of coke—like, with a gun—in mid-air and all those crystals come flying off the screen like a million tiny, pretty snowflakes right into your face. Hey, ow!

Word up. It’s beginning to look a lot like A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas. Ignoring the Escape From Guantanamo Bay thing in the middle that didn’t sound very funny, one seems to recall the first H & K stoner odyssey, Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle, as being stupidly good reefer madness. Cough. Or at least didn’t Neil Patrick Harris ride a cheetah?

Now Harold (John Cho) is a Wall Street trader with a hot wife (Paula Garcés) and a scary Mexican father-in-law (Danny Trejo, who else?) who’s arrived for Christmas with mucho scary tattoos. Kumar (Kal Penn), meanwhile, is basically living inside a bong, bummed after his hot girlfriend ditched him. Santa sends him a monster joint—Santa, what list is that?—and everything, including a totally important Christmas tree, goes up in smoke.

A Manhattan odyssey ensues, involving more crispy Christmas trees, Russian mobsters, a Wafflebot (don’t ask me, man), and more drugs than Charlie Sheen could suck up in six months. Er, a week. There’s wacky Claymation—Duck, a penis!—equal-opportunity mockery of all creeds and colours, and Neil Patrick Harris is back and bad.

But, sorry to be a “fucking choad”, this Christmas is amiable and amusing but not exactly hysterical. Oh, except for the baby. Why is a baby high on weed, coke, and ecstasy funny? Don’t be a toolbox. It just is.

Watch the trailer for A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas.