HIGHLY UNAMUSING

How High

Although they made only one good movie, Cheech and Chong loom ever larger
as the only pot-heads who were ever funny enough to sustain a feature film
of toke jokes. Certainly, such recent stoner fare as Half-baked and Friday
were vastly inferior to Cheech and Chong's Up in Smoke (1978), while How
High represents a new low in marijuana comedy.

Hip-hop artists Method Man and Redman star as Silas and Jamal, two
layabouts who accidentally discover a way to smoke up and simultaneously
succeed in school. Silas is a lay apothecary who knows how to cultivate
different strains of grass for medicinal purposes. Through a series of
convolutions, Silas and Jamal end up smoking grass nourished in the ashes
of a dead friend, Ivory (Chuck Davis), who then returns to them in a vision
and tells them the answer to exam questions.

Acing their standardized tests, Silas and Jamal end up at Harvard and the
movie turns into a humourless re-make of Animal House. The hood meets the
Ivy League when Silas asks himself, "How could I fail Women's Studies? I
love bitches,"

As Harvard men, Silas and Jamal are constantly battling the uptight Dean
Cain (Obba Babatunde), a repressed Uncle Tom who resents their ghetto attitude.

The stuck-up, snobby Dean is perhaps a hint as to why How High fails so
miserably. Animal House was set in the early 1960s, when it was mildly
plausible a Dean might make war against students who have too much fun, but
is there any university in 2001 where such a figure exists?

In the real Harvard, there is at least one professor (Cornel West), who has
recorded a rap album. Rather than fighting anachronistic forces of
repression, Jamal and Silas should be shown trying to fit into an elite
university where the professors are wannabes.

In true pot-head form, the movie descends into an incoherent farrago of
fart jokes, getting-the-munchies jokes, and
unsuspecting-squares-becoming-stoned-after-eating-hash brownies-jokes.

Director Jesse Dylan (son of Bob), best known for doing music videos,
allows the movie to become a series of unconnected incidents and dropped
narrative threads.

Toward the end, most of the humour involves Silas and Jamal pushing around
their enemies with impunity. A spirit of cruelty enters into the movie as
they start injuring people weaker than themselves.

The nice thing about Cheech and Chong was that they were truly
self-deprecating. We were invited to laugh at them for their dopey good
nature, rather than admire them as successful bullies.

In the end, Method Man and Redman prove that Cheech and Chong remain the
masters of cannabis comedy.

Rating: No stars