Harold and Kumar are in their apartment after they’ve successfully completed their White Castle quest. It’s only an hour or two later, and the guys are preparing for an epic adventure to Amsterdam so that Harold can win the heart of his crush, Maria. At the airport, Kumar runs into his ex-girlfriend, Vanessa, and he’s shocked to discover she’s about to get married. Before they even get on the plane, Kumar threatens to botch the mission by mixing it up with airport security personnel, insisting on protesting a random search. Though they do make it onto the plane, Kumar eventually succeeds in getting them into more trouble than they bargained for. Unable to wait six hours to get to Amsterdam, Kumar takes a home-made “smokeless bong” into the airplane bathroom. Turbulence strikes, the bathroom door swings open, the bong’s mistaken for a bomb, and the guys are mistaken for terrorists. The plane is turned around and the guys are detained in Guantanamo Bay. - skip ad - Genres: Comedy and Sequel Running Time: 1 hr. 42 min. Release Date: April 25th, 2008 (wide) MPAA Rating: R for strong crude and sexual content, graphic nudity, pervasive language and drug use. Distributor: New Line Cinema, Warner Bros. Pictures Distribution Cast And Credits Starring: John Cho, Kal Penn, Eric Winter, David Krumholtz, Neil Patrick Harris Directed by: Jon Hurwitz, Hayden Schlossberg Produced by: Carsten Lorenz, Joe Drake, Toby Emmerich

Innumerable sharks lurk in the ocean between New Jersey and Cuba, and Harold and Kumar just jumped every one of them.

The stoner duo's second film, "Harold & Kumar: Escape From Guantanamo Bay," lacks the fresh charm that made their first such an unexpected (if guilty) pleasure. Word-of-mouth likely will be bad, so producers should pray that their bong-hitting target audience is alert enough to get out on opening weekend. "Escape" bows April 25. It screened over the weekend at the South by Southwest film festival.

The odd-couple protagonists are drawn more broadly here than in their debut, an approach that Harold (John Cho) survives better than his co-star, Kumar (Kal Penn).

After the funny plot-starting sequence, in which Kumar brings a high-tech bong on an international flight and gets them both mistaken for would-be bombers, the character's string of stupid moves plays out less like endearing haplessness than like willful, inexplicable attempts to wreck his buddy's life.

The boys get sent to Gitmo, depicted not with any political edge but as a generic house of squalor and sodomy. They quickly escape on a raft -- going on the lam in the direction of Texas via Miami. There, a well-connected acquaintance (who's about to marry Kumar's ex-girlfriend) might help get the Feds off their backs.

Those G-men are led by Rob Corddry, a gifted comedian who, even after years of studied cluelessness on "The Daily Show," can't make the script's one-note Patriot Act-enabled incompetence entertaining for more than a few minutes.

The ensuing road trip has a bright spot or two (a fantasy menage a trois with a bag of pot and an earnest love poem built around a nerdy math conceit) but seems intentionally dumbed-down.

By the time a George Bush look-alike arrives to offer unlikely assistance, the audience will rightly expect the script to fumble that comic opportunity as well.