Country:
USA
Recognizable Faces:
Bradley Cooper
Ed Helms
Zach Galifianakis
Justin Bartha
Ken Jeong
Paul Giamatti
Jeffrey Tambor
Directed By:
Todd Phillips
Cult movies aren't always the easiest nut to crack. I reviewed the first HANGOVER in 2010 and I admit I didn't get its beauty at the time. It took me multiple viewings to start anticipating the cool moments and say the say the dialog lines along with the characters. It would be a whole other movie if I had to watch it again. I did the same thing with THE BIG LEBOWSKI a few years back. Not that the two movies are in the same league, but you get the idea. I ended up racking around a hundred viewings of the Coen brothers' godly comedy. So I watched THE HANGOVER PART II with a knife jacked in-between my teeth, expecting Phil, Allan and Stu to wreak some serious havoc in Thailand, a country that embraced chaos and integrated it to its economy a long time ago. Was I right to be so pumped up about this? Somewhat. If you use the same idea twice, in a different setting, it's not going to have the freshness and the spontaneity of the first time. THE HANGOVER PART II is a recycled product, so it does have a certain organic charm.
It's Stu's (Ed Helms) turn to get married this time. Not with the crazy, controlling chick he was engaged to in the first, but to a quiet and submissive Asian woman named Lauren (Jamie Chung). He makes an effort to avoid what happened to them in Vegas a few years back, by organizing a bachelor's brunch on a Sunday morning, much to Doug (Bartha) and Phil (Cooper)'s dismay. They leave for Thailand soon after, but not before Doug convinces Stu to invite his quirky brother-in-law Alan (Galifianakis) who was responsible for all the trouble in the first movie, having given roofies to the group. The wedding celebrations are well underway and only a beer on the beach, in between friends separate them from the actual ceremony. The next morning, they wake up in a hotel in Bangkok, just like last time and Teddy, Lauren's little brother, is missing. Oh yeah his cutoff finger is in the room with them.
I have to give it to Todd Phillips and his team of screenwriters, they milk the hell out of the panorama of depravity Bangkok has to offer. Superposed to the existing history in between the three protagonists, you have room for many, many different funny situations. The mercurial Leslie Chow (Ken Jeong) is also back and still has somewhat of a defining part in the story. My favorite scene, I think was at the pre-wedding dinner where Lauren's dad compares his about to be son-in-law to plain rice and ensues this weird clash with Alan, who tries to claim the merits of his friends in his own peculiar way. The relationship between Stu and his father-in-law has some of the biggest comedic elements of the movie, but it's not exploited very much.
Everything is turned up a notch in THE HANGOVER PART II. They tried to make it more intense, funnier, darker also to a certain extent. On some aspects it works, on others not so much. Many elements of the first HANGOVER were so perfectly on pitch that making them just a little harder is sometimes trying too hard. The Mr. Chow storyline for example, while wonderfully random in the first, is really out of tune with the characters' problems this time around. Overall, THE HANGOVER PART II is good, but not as funny and refreshing as the first movie. The problem is not the actors, they are as great and energetic as ever (Bradley Cooper can act a little. He keeps surprising me). The problem lies in the screenwriting, which isn't as well developed as it should've been. It feels rushed and unpolished at times. It's still a good movie. I had my fair share of laughs, so I don't complain but I hope they won't stretch the joke to a third and a fourth film.
SCORE: 77%