One of the keys to a good movie is that is has to feel fresh. Even if it isn’t all that novel, it still has to at least fool the audience into thinking they’re seeing something new. If they realize they’re seeing something they’ve seen before, a film is far more likely to lose them completely. This is what hijacks The Hangover: Part II, the sequel to the out-of-nowhere box office smash from 2009. It doesn’t feel fresh because it never makes any effort to distance itself from the original. It’s one thing to recycle the same exact premise of the original. It’s another to re-do it beat by beat by beat. With the first film, there was a feeling that the audience was watching something fresh and exciting. The Hangover: Part II feels too much like reheated leftovers for it to fully work its magic.
As advertised, the film is more or less a carbon copy of the first with only a handful of nouns changed. This time, the groom in question is Stu (Ed Helms), who is getting married to dream girl Lauren (Jamie Chung). So, the “wolf pack” of Phil (Bradley Cooper), Doug (Justin Bartha) and Alan (Zach Galifianakis) all journey out to Thailand for the wedding. To celebrate, they all go out to the beach for a drink with the 16-year-old Teddy (Mason Lee). It’s all going swimmingly, until Stu, Phil and Alan wake up the next morning in a Bangkok hotel. On top of that, Teddy has gone missing. Now, it’s up to our heroes to find him and find their way back in time for Stu’s wedding.
It’s not that The Hangover: Part II is actively awful. Far from it. It just lacks the spark of what made the first film such a fun experience. Both films are essentially mystery stories played for comedy, so when you present a near-identical mystery with a near-identical solution, it just doesn’t make for all that interesting an experience. While watching The Hangover, I wanted Helms, Cooper and Galifianakis to find Justin Bartha. This time, there’s never any doubt as to where it’s ultimately going. As such, the audience becomes irreversibly detached from the movie, and thus any attempts at comedy prove ineffective. You can’t make someone laugh if they’re not paying much attention in the first place.
Because of its predictability, the film is sort of lifeless. Yet it never goes south of mediocre simply because the winning cast is enough to save even the most dire of material. Cooper, Helms and Galifiankis have such great comedic chemistry that anytime they’re onscreen together it’s at least worth a look. (As with the first film, Galifianakis’ Alan gets most of the laughs.) By all accounts, The Hangover: Part II should be outright detestable. The fact that it’s even “average” is a testament to those involved. At the same time, it’s disappointing they didn’t try to take any risks.
Even through all this, mainstream audiences will probably come out of the theater saying they loved it. I can’t blame them. In most cases, they just want to go to the theater, have a laugh and go home. Still, even the world’s biggest Hangover devotee is unlikely to call this an improvement. It’s just more of what they liked the first time, served exactly the same way. Perhaps that’s good enough for some, but it didn’t quite fly for me. I’m not saying my opinion is more valid, I’m just less accepting of things like this.
Todd Phillips does a lot of things well. For one, he and cinematographer Lawrence Sher have shown a real ability to make his films look fantastic. It’s rare to see mainstream comedies that are shot as well as Phillips’ last few films. What’s more problematic is that he seems to have gotten far too comfortable with this Hangover formula. After he struck gold with the first film, he proceeded to make his next two projects (Due Date and now this) out of essentially the same formula. The Hangover: Part II is neither as good nor as bad as it could have been, though you can’t ignore the feeling that they let something get away here.
GRADE: C+
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