'A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas' disappoints writer

Ever since I saw "Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle," I made the conscious decision to give all of its sequels the benefit of the doubt. I thought that "Guantanamo Bay" was, at best, passable, but their latest film, "A Very Harold and Kumar Christmas," may very well be the worst of the three.

This film finds Kumar as it always does: stoned. He walks up to a mall Santa and sits on his lap in order to set up a drug deal with the guy. It has apparently been six years since he last saw "Roldy," and his love interest in the second film, Vanessa, has recently left him. Meanwhile, a married Harold has worked his way up to becoming some sort of big-time executive on Wall Street. (I'm not exactly sure what his job is, because it was obviously only put into the film as a pretense to have protesters "occupying Wall Street" in the movie.) Both men have essentially moved on from one another forming new "best friendships" with Thomas Lennon for Harold and Amir Blumenfeld for Kumar.

As with most of the situations in the "Harold and Kumar" films, Harold has a legitimate problem that he is dealing with and Kumar comes along to "help" and ends up screwing everything up and leaving it worse than how he found it. Harold is doing his best to impress his father-in-law (played by Danny Trejo) by making Christmas as perfect as he can for him. Then, just as things are starting to look up for him, Kumar comes along and accidently burns down the prized Christmas tree. And thus begins the all-night journey to get a new one.

In the first scene with Harold, there is a line where he says something about 3D having "jumped the shark." This is a very apt way letting the audience know that the 3D is going to get annoying very quickly. And it does. There are some instances where it is used well but there are far more where it is just plain distracting. For instance, anytime anybody is smoking weed, the smoke would billow out and make the whole screen a bit hazy.

"H&K 3" did have some pretty funny moments, but, unfortunately, with no help from the two headliners. I think the funniest supporters were probably Amir, the daughter of Thomas Lennon's character, and, of course, Neil Patrick Harris. I have loved Amir ever since I stumbled upon his web series on CollegeHumor called "Jake and Amir." So, I got a few laughs from most of his scenes in the film. Also, the little girl who played Lennon's daughter was pretty hysterical. She only had a few lines, but it was pretty funny to see this little girl who, throughout the film, gets high off second-hand smoke, accidentally ingests cocaine and later pops some ecstasy when her father isn't looking.

I think the point where I just tuned out and stopped caring has to be the point at which Harold shoot Santa Claus in the face, Kumar fixes him up using medical supplies they find in Santa's sleigh and then Santa gives them each a ride home in said sleigh. Unforgivable in my opinion.

There were some pretty good, humorous things about this movie that did redeem it a bit. However, nothing could make me overlook the fact that I saw entirely too many penises and not nearly enough boobies.