The Hangover Part 2 Review

If someone had said that a story about four guys heading to Vegas for a bachelor party would make a good movie, your first question would be “what’s the kicker?”. Well the kicker is that they get so drunk and wake up the next day in the hotel room with no memory of what happened. But it gets better, the groom is missing. And even better, they find out that somewhere in their binge drinking they were slipped a huge doze of a date rape drug. To even more comedy they caused a lot of trouble in and around Vegas the night before. That was the conception of a 2009 movie called The Hangover , which turned out to be a huge massive success. No question that it was a truly funny film to begin with. But due to the huge success of that film, they decided to produce a sequel. Well in retrospect they should have left the first one alone.

The whole gist of “Part 2” is this. The wolfpack has moved past the whole incident in Las Vegas. Stu (Ed Helms) is getting married to his fiance Lauren (Jamie Chung) in Thailand, which is were her family originates from. So the entire group including Phil (Bradley Cooper), Doug (Justin Bartha), and of course Alan (Zach Galifianakis) are all headed to Thailand. It does not take long for everybody including the Lauren’s brother Teddy (Mason Lee) to experience a little deja vu again. Everybody is sitting around a campfire on the beach and next thing you know, Phil, Stu, and Alan wake up in a mysterious and beat up hotel room with no memory of what happened. Also they have lost Teddy. So the wolfpack (Doug fortunately was not present when things begin to get crazy) must go through the city of Bangkok to find Teddy but also look for answers as to what they did the night before.

That is the whole story of “Part 2” now can someone please tell me that this is not the same formula that we witnessed in the first movie. Well I hate to say it but it is. One of the real problems with this movie is that it is an exact copy of the first film. They follow the same routine and the same actions. There is nothing different in this movie at all. They just simply did the same movie again but substituted Las Vegas for Bangkok. They even changed the catch phrase “what happens in vegas, stays in vegas” for “Bangkok got him”.

The fact that they did the same movie again is only part of the problem. The rest of the problem comes from many of the gags that are used throughout. Mostly in regards to what the guys did during their drunken night. There is one part where they went to a strip club and Stu has a little fling with one of the hookers. I won’t spoil the surprise here but I will say that that part created a lot of bad mental pictures that I am still trying to get rid of. Also seeing a monkey smoking cigarettes was a little ridiculous. To sum it up, they went a little too over the top with the crudeness and the gross out humor on this one.

To give an accurate and reasonable rating for this movie, I would have to say that it did not live up to the first movie. I think that they really should have left the first film alone. They repeated the same stuff and changed nothing. In so doing I felt that they drained a lot of the fun out of the characters. When watching the first movie you actually sympathize with them. Here the sympathy is gone and the much of the “it could happen to you” humor was gotten rid of. Now the movie was okay and it had a few funny moments but it gets dragged down by the problems I mentioned before. And to top it off it was way too over the top with the crude and gross out humor than it needed to be.

Adam Miller

Movies Correspondent and Associate Producer, The RPM Show

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