Review of The Hangover Part II (2011) by Iron_Mal — 14 Jun 2011

Let me start by saying that I actually liked the original Hangover quite a lot despite going into it with a 'this is gonna suck' mentality, I was delightfully proven wrong on that one and found the first movie to be rich in both childish in your face humour and a pretty decent narrative and story to boot.

Then came the sequel, the first thing I have to say is what everyone else has been saying, it's the same damn movie! Just with the setting changed to Bangkok, with every mischevious deed turned up to eleven and with our not-so-heroic punching bags of the first film turned into people we're supposed to sympathise for and want to succeed in escaping.

Another issue I had was that while it copies the first film without shame, all the characters from the first have either changed dramatically or have gone missing completely. Alan has changed from being an oddball manchild who was too simple minded to know any better into a raging **** who is selfish, self-centered, out of touch with reality and sometimes borders on being a dangerous psychopath. Stu has changed from the hen-pecked and whipped 'yes dear' boyfriend into a guy who claims to 'struggle with a raging transexual sex demon' (a plot point which comes out of nowhere and never goes anywhere or gets resolved I might add, more on that later) and for some reason has completely abandoned the promising relationsip with the Hooker with a heart of gold from the first film (I think they give an off handed explanation as to why but it's easily missed so I'm just assuming it's because they needed an excuse for the film to take place in Bangkok, cue foreign wedding!). Phil...hardly does anything in this film, I swear the only scene I can remember him being the central focus of outside his introduction at the beginning was him getting shot...that's it, just him getting shot in the arm, and he's supposed to be one of the central characters.

Unlike the first film where the characters have their comuppances from their various wrongdoings and get beatings, finger wagging and other very clear explanations that they've been ****s and it's their own damn fault for thinking of Vegas as their own personal playground, no such rebukings come in this film, everything that goes wrong they either get away from scott free or it actually turns out to work in their favour (they start a riot that literally levels part of Bangkok and nothing ever comes as a result of this, it's as if no-one cares about mass death and destruction but I slept with a transexual hooker? I'M A MONSTER!), in the first film, the Wolf Pack are the philandering bastards who did wrong and now must make amends while in the second they're apparantly just normal innocent guys who got mixed up in the perverse trappings of the 'evil city' and must now need to make their way out while still looking like the good guys, something that made me come to realise just how much I did not like the main characters as people at all.

Plot points also have a point of just being dropped at a moment's notice or being introduced with no rhyme or reason, for examle: at the beginning it's established that Alan intensesly hates Stu's younger brother-in-law to be, Teddy, to the point where he wants him drugged so he can be taken out of the picture. This would be all fine and good if it weren't for the fact that we're not really given a reason as to why he hates him ('he's not one of the wolf pack' didn't sell me, sorry) and later he either resolves and corrects his hatred of him off-screen and without mention or the writer's just forgot because it's pretty much never mentioned again except for one shouting match which also ends disappointingly, is never mentioned again and only served to highlight more plot holes (like why are they still friends with Alan? He has no redeeming qualities in this movie). Even the way they got to Bangkok is never explained, a lot of clues as to what happened either go literally nowhere or are ommitted until the ending credits (where we finally learn how Teddy lost his finger).

Overall, this was an awful film. It had it's funny moments, sure, but most of the time they were just either slapstick violence, immature 'tee hee' laughs that stopped being funny the first time or lazy rehashings or subversions of jokes we saw the first time around. Don't watch if you can help it.