Review of The Hangover Part II (2011) by Shiira — 09 Jul 2011

Did Alan do a very bad thing? Something even worse than burying a dead prostitute in the desert? In the 1997 Peter Berg film, it's "Heaven or Las Vegas" indeed, when a bachelor party goes horribly awry with one irrevocable maneuver by a coked-up reveler that leads to a sexually-engaged woman being impaled against the lavatory wall.

Zonked out on blow, Michael unknowingly practices necrophilia for a couple of seconds before realizing that they're finished, but it's the wrong fluid coming out of the wrong body, an unhappy ending to a hotel room bacchanal which leaves him flaccid and panic-stricken.

Not surprisingly, things go from bad to worse, once it's agreed upon by this assemblage of damned men to cover up the crime, because soon enough, their foolhardy conspiracy snowballs with lightning speed when a hotel security guard discovers the lifeless stripper on the bathroom floor, forcing Robert to commit premeditated murder.

The tragi-comedy of errors lead the Kafkaesque suburbanites to a plot of arid land just outside the "Sin City" limits, where like mafiosos, they hollow out a trench for the bodies, their respective anatomies all intermixed, much to the disgruntlement of Adam, who believes that the commingled dead is an affront to his faith.

The film itself, however, doesn't share the Judaic worshipper's earnestness. The corrected sacrilege is replaced with a sacrilege of its own, since the whole scene plays out with a tone of disaffected irreverence toward the dead that recalls both "Pulp Fiction" and "Kill Bill: Vol.

1". The black security guard corresponds to the black captive whom Vincent accidentally shoots(prompting the infamous "dead n***** storage" line), and the Asian hooker corresponds to Gogo Yubari, whose eyes leak blood after "The Bride" hits her on the side of the head with some exposed nails from a wood board.

"Very Bad Things" shares with Tarantino his predilection for brutal comedic situations. The desert scene is supposed to be "funny" because the two victims' disparate skin colors makes the sorting of body parts easier for the conspirators.

But unlike Tarantino, the filmmaker can't get away with murder, so what becomes foregrounded is the queasy fact that white people are dispassionately killing minorities. In "The Hangover", the moviegoer first meets Mr.

Chow literally springing into action from the opening of a car trunk. Because the gangster is on the offensive, thoroughly beating his kidnappers into submission, while nude, mind you, what goes unnoticed by the moviegoer is the possibility that Alan(who in "The Hangover Part II", purposely drugs Teddy) tried to suffocate Chow after fleecing him of his eighty grand.

And then there's "black Doug", the wrong Doug at the ransom drop-off, an innocent man whom Phil would willingly return into Chow's custody for the money. Black Doug could die. These seemingly nice guys, on closer inspection, are no better than Robert and his minions.

The perception that "The Hangover" resembles "Very Bad Things" only on a superficial level is inaccurate. The broad humor obscures their diabolical natures. "I don't care if we kill somebody," goes one of Alan's patented non-sequiturs from a rooftop where this "f****** psycho(called so after Phil learns about the marshmallows, meant solely for Teddy, in "Part II") spikes the Jagermeister with rohypnol.

If Phil only knew the whole story. Bold for a popular comedy, Alan seems to be a registered sex offender. Back home, Alan tells his future brother-in-law that he shouldn't "be within two-hundred feet of a school, or a Chuck E.

Cheese." Since no follow-up question is forthcoming from Doug, he must be privy to his future brother-in-law's checkered past, and keeps it a secret from Phil and Stu, and more importantly, the audience, who would be repulsed by a well-delineated account.

With Doug missing, Alan simulates masturbation on a baby. To Phil, it's just a harmless sight gag. Phil doesn't know that he's witnessing a relapse. Unfortunately, nobody thinks twice about "Carlos" being strapped to Alan's chest.

At the police station, following their arrest for stealing a cop car, exactly what are the cops staring at which would prompt them to stage a stun gun presentation for children? Alan's rap sheet, perhaps? Quite pointedly, a child tasers Alan in the face.

Thailand, of all places, a pedophile's wet dream, is the setting for "The Hangover Part II". Interestingly, there's a fantasy sequence where Alan and his friends are boys again, riding around Bangkok in a car.

Could this be a veiled reference to "Little Children"? Whereas Ronnie is put through the ringer by his neighbors before he earns redemption, Alan's crimes are implicitly pardoned from the get-go, on account of his pronounced naivety.

At Caesar's Palace, Alan asks the female concierge if the famed Roman general once lived here.