Starring Kal Penn and John Cho. Rated 18A.

When we last saw our stoner college pals Harold (John Cho) and Kumar (Kal Penn), they had just come home from a tough night of burger-shopping. What happens in the eventfully titled Harold & Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay occurs in the next few days, starting when the lads hop on a plane to Amsterdam to pursue Harold’s dream girl (Paula Garcés) and because, well, you can get high there.

Of course, that doesn’t stop the terminally casual Kumar from bringing his own smokables, thus unleashing another world of trouble. (And, let’s face it, bong does sound a lot like bomb over the noise of those jet engines.) Our boys soon find themselves in orange jumpsuits and whisked away to a barnlike prison that, in truth, little resembles the antiseptic nightmare Americans have built on Cuban soil.

Re-creating reality is not the aim of the stereotype-tweaking Harold & Kumar movies, which find their put-upon heroes rambling quickly through surreal encounters with rednecks, hookers, and Neil Patrick Harris. Neither is subtlety. Still, how far from the truth is it when the blustery Homeland Security honcho (The Daily Show’s Rob Corddry) takes a page of the U.S. Constitution and literally wipes his ass with it? In case that point is lost, the current rival for Kumar’s seemingly cleaned-up pothead girlfriend (Danneel Harris) is a Bush-family crony (Eric Winter) who would ship his own granny to Gitmo if it would advance his career in Republican politics.

Although a segment with Dubya impersonator James Adomian is quite funny on the face of it, this gross and frequently subversive movie (directed and cowritten, as before, by Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg) appears to be positioning the War Criminal-in-Chief as an amiable slacker with daddy issues and a scary vice president.