Geekscape Movie Reviews: The Hangover Part 2
I don’t get blackout drunk that often. It has been known to happen a time or two, like when I went and made sure I was “prepared” for a stage version of John Hughes’ “The Breakfast Club” at Tres Stage. (This one sentence is all the review that stage production needs, good people, bad idea to think they could adapt Hughes.) I surprisingly woke up at my desk at work the next day with very little memory of how I got there and what I had done the night before.
A few quick calls around to the people I had been with and I discovered I got really boring, slurred my speech and got really quiet before stumbling home/back to the office. That apparently is not the case for the characters in Hangover 2. The characters in the Hangover universe would appear to manage to maintain a great deal of their faculties when truly f’d up and have amazing adventures that they can’t remember the next day. We know this isn’t the case, but somehow these guys manage to go through the same scenario twice?
When we last saw the characters from the Hangover, Dentist Stu (Ed Helms) was married to a prostitute and dumping his bitchy girlfriend. Apparently things didn’t end well with said prostitute and now Stu is preparing to marry Lauren (Jamie Chung) in her family’s native Thailand. In the lead up to the wedding he has invited Phil (Bradley Cooper), & Doug (Justin Bartha), and avoided interaction with Alan (Zach Galifiniakis).
In an effort to lift him out of a slump, Phil and Doug convince Stu to invite Alan to the wedding. There is also a future brother in law that Stu loves and a future father in law that views Stu with contempt. The films then follows the road map laid out by the first film. Two days before the wedding the guys go to have a simple drink on the beach and wake up in Bangkok. Hungover. Again.
They then begin trying to piece together the night before using clues they find and constantly referencing how this keeps happening to them. Mr. Chow (Ken Jeong) returns as a catalyst for some of the trouble the guys are trying to unwind, but it never feels like there’s any real threat to the lost character, Stu’s future brother-in-law Teddy. Why? Because the film sticks so closely to the original’s structure, there is no room to be surprised. You know very early that the goose chase is well a goose chase, and it takes the gas out of the movie.
This movie is what I would expect from a student who didn’t write a paper the night before an essay is due and began selectively copying a work. Change a name here, a location there. There is no originality in the film at all, just 2 hours of raunchier jokes and dumber connections between plot points. A good sequel is never just a simple rehash of its predecessor. There are a minor selection of memorable scenes, but they are surprisingly the quiet moments where we just see “the Wolfpack” being good friends, not the over the top attempts at comedy. Outside of the strip club and car chase scenes, it’s the characters moments in the film that are the only times I buy in and relax a little.
Hangover 2 is funny. There are parts where you can’t breathe from laughing so hard. The actors are all charming enough, and slide easily back into the roles that made them famous. The film just has no bite. The amount of raunchiness thrown in for shock value is a calculated maneuver that feels forced and unoriginal. “You were shocked by a penis in part one? How about ten penises? We’re offensive and shocking.”
I would have loved seeing this set of characters on a road trip or dealing with fatherhood or any plethora of options , but the exact same plot? THE EXACT SAME?! Why would you waste our time?
