Review: The Hangover Part 2

The Hangover: Part II

Before I say anything, there will be spoilers in this impression. So if you haven’t seen this movie yet and don’t want to ruin anything for yourself.

Stop reading now.

The Hangover: Part II has officially joined the ranks of American Pie. You can bet we’ll see sequel after sequel and potentially direct-to-dvd titles. A third movie has already been planned and it’s no surprise with this movie setting records this Memorial Day weekend and taking the top spot. It’s already doubled it’s budget and how this film even cost $80 million to make, boggles my mind. Maybe it’s because the somewhat no-name actors are no longer no-name. Bradley Cooper is slowly becoming an somewhat A-list celebrity and is one superhero movie from making his mark. Ed Helms is recognizable after his missing tooth and finally Zach Galifianakis’ well, other than trying to pronounce and spell his last name, he is pretty self explanatory. My point being, the Wolfpack is exactly that. A brand name in themselves. It started off as a funny inside joke but now it’s the subtitle to the movie. Cooper is still the cool and charismatic guy of the group, Helms plays the reluctant ‘wild’ friend and Galifianakis is still very much the crazy brother-in-law from the first movie. Then there is Justin Bartha aka Doug who is unfortunately placed once again back in the background. Only to be replaced by the acting debut of Ang Lee’s son, Mason Lee.

I don’t know where to actually start with talking about this movie. I’ll put it right out there though, I did not like this film whatsoever.

I’m not going to try to attack this film but more so try to creatively criticize what could have been done much differently with this movie. However it doesn’t matter what I say here, I’m wrong. The box office numbers don’t lie, the general public apparently wants this type of movie. Maybe I’ll end up attacking more so the people that enjoyed this film, but I can’t hate on that aspect if it’s exactly what people wanted. And when I say that, I mean the exact same movie as the first Hangover.

I suppose if I had watched this movie first and not the original one, it’s a curious thought of how my impression might actually be. But that’s not the case, for the first movie I fell to the hype but never caught the first film in the theatre. I tend to dismiss watching comedies in the theatre generally but this summer, The Hangover sequel was on my watch list. I bought the first movie blindly on blu-ray, expectations were relatively high and cause of that I didn’t enjoy it as much as I thought I would. However that being said, I’ve seen the first movie several times since then and in some strange manner, it’s grown on me – a lot. It has a lot of silly quirks that I find extremely funny and it’s these subtle nuances which are missing in the sequel. As I mentioned earlier, the sequel is the exact same movie all over again. This time things are much more raunchy and forcibly over the top.

Instead of Las Vegas, we’re in Thailand, instead of Justin Bartha’s character Doug getting married this time it’s Ed Helms’ Stu character. Zack Galifianakis’ character Alan doesn’t change, except here he’s portrayed as more of an idiot than the idiot savant from the first film. It was a redeeming character trait the first film had, it was enjoyable to see mixed in with craziness of Alan. You don’t see Alan beating the odds of the blackjack table here. You see him just being an incredibly insensitive and clueless moron. It’s not funny, it’s just dumb and barely dumb humor.

Cooper’s character Phil is still the cool asshole. He swears a lot and goes through the paces of trying to recall what happened the night before. If anything he just ensures that the script has enough ‘fuck, fucked, fucking’ in it to make sure the swear count allows for an R-rating. Phil stays the same, he’s still wanting a good time at the expense of his friends because his normal daily life is seemingly sedentary and pedantic. The contrast is supposed to be funny, like when you see him sitting in an IHOP swearing left and right, with his baby daughter quietly beside him for the ‘bachelor brunch’. In the end for me, it’s more annoying and unreasonable – at least in that particular scene. You get the impression while he’ll always be up for a good time, it’s a controlled drunk. He’ll do crazy stuff, but he won’t pull his own tooth or get a tattoo on his face. Ed Helms as Stu if anything bugged me the most. He was more of a side character in the first movie, enough doses, enough humor but here he’s just brought to be the main character. How the film ends was incredibly irritating which his own self-revelation that he has a dark side to reason out the things he does, I’ll get to that later. The consequences of the events is his own stupidity, but we’re told to accept it and even worse believe it would actually happen. In fact Phil/Stu’s roles are reversed in the sequel, however in contrast to Phil, Stu is not nearly as charismatic and it’s not enough to carry the film at all.

A big disappointment for me was Justin Bartha’s character being put the background once again, it’s a rehash and his character is actually replaced by Mason Lee who plays the younger brother of Ed Helms’ bride to be Jamie Chung. Before I talk about Mason Lee’s character Teddy. I just have to put this out there, as pretty as Chung is there is no way in hell she’d marry Ed Helms. I know there was probably a beautiful casting hour held but it’s not believable at all. It’s not that we have to typically suspend the believably of things but there stands to some reason that things are supposed to be believable. I don’t see the problem of just casting an unknown. It added to the personality of the first film and not necessarily unknowns but recognizable faces in supportive roles.

We don’t get Mike Epps as ‘Black’ Doug, we don’t get Heather Graham as the stripper, there is no Rob Riggle and Cleo King as the cop duo, Jeffrey Tambor is minimized and there is no hilarious wedding band with Dan Finnerty going over the top at the end. It’s not the Wolfpack themselves that made the first movie funny, it’s the casting overall which made it complete. So while the first movie cost $35 million to make, how in the hell did this second one cost $80 million to make and wasn’t able to cast anyone remotely funny to help sidekick the laughter.

Did everything go to Paul Giamatti playing a gangster type of roll? I saw him do this already, it was with Clive Owen in Shoot Em’ Up and he was much funnier there. Was it decided that Ken Jeong get all the screen time instead as Chow? It surely couldn’t have cost a lot to get Yasmin Lee to show us her penis on the big screen. Did someone in casting have to sit down and watch a ton of transsexual pornos and to just find the right person to fill that role? Was that where the money went?

I just don’t understand what happened. The sequel is so low risk in that it’s the exact same film all over again, I mean honestly what did it have to lose? I also have to ask who the hell thought casting Mason Lee was a good idea. Every scene with this guy was incredibly awkward. It was like watching an actor consciously know he was being filmed on camera. The facial expressions and everything about his acting was incredibly forced and absolutely unbelievably terrible. The guy actually broke the pacing of the film just being on camera and was the most cringe-worthy thing I’ve ever seen in all the movies I’ve watched. The way he delivered his lines and everything about the ordeal of his character in the film and how his resolution came about is absolutely not believable. He’s a ‘pre-med’ genius who is going to Stanford for early admission, but also is a skilled cellist. This guy loses a finger during a drunken night and is “cool” with it? Literally his reaction is “you know I woke up this morning not remembering anything and I lost my finger, but all I know is I had fun” and then calmly sighs with a smile on his face and says in closing, “Bangkok”.

We get it, ‘Bangkok has him now’ was the line said over and over as an inside joke, to set up the final resolution. Maybe I need to go to Thailand to understand.

But I mean really? Honestly that’s the ‘realistic’ ending you’re going to give us to his character. The guy won’t be able to play the cello ever as easily again or assumedly at all and you can’t tell me that losing a finger won’t effect his abilities to want to become a doctor. Maybe I’m applying just way too much logic to this film, but it’s this very thing that breaks the sequel from what the first did so well. It’s supposed to be a crazy story of what you did the night before while you blacked out and got incredibly hammered. You do stupid shit, you might maybe regret it, you’ll definitely feel embarrassed, it will most assuredly be a story you will never live down. But at least the first film has some level of actual reason to it.

Perhaps the sequel was just too over the top for me that I couldn’t relate to it at all. It wasn’t the middle man drug dealing monkey, hell I was ok with that. Listening to Chow explain it was totally believable because of his character. His delivery of explaining is funny because it’s so cavalier and nonchalant. In the first movie, stealing a tiger is totally crazy. However stealing a tiger from Mike Tyson makes it even funnier, because it’s Mike Tyson. But again, it’s believable that he would actually own a tiger. Stu marrying a stripper while drunk is totally believable. It’s a normal subplot in other films. Stealing a cop car, that’s a crazy over the top ‘movie’ scenario. It led to the comical showdown between Alan and the kid tasing him. What I’m getting at is the first film linked the events of the night in an actually intellectual manner. It paced the movie along and it worked. It worked damn well and it was clever, original and charismatic with how it did it.

Instead we get them kidnapping a monk from a monastery and Alan achieving inner peace to recall the events for the next clue. To which who thought it was a funny idea to depict underage minors drinking to replay the evening? Was that supposed to be funny? I just honestly found it reckless. Everything that was clever about the first movie ended up being convenient in the sequel, especially with how they linked the events of the night together.

I was hopeful in while watching this film. When the ‘Wolfpack’ wakes up in a stupor, not knowing what happened the night before I thought to myself. Ok, now it begins. When they woke up not knowing what city they were in, ok that added another level of mystery to it all. I was ready for the adventure. I just did not expect it would be the exact same adventure from the first movie. It’s like retelling your own drunken story amongst friends for the first time. It’s funny and memorable the first time. You don’t necessarily retell the story again to the same friends, because they already know how awesome the story is. They’ll remember it, because it’s an awesome story. It’s plain and simple, stating the obvious. Your friends aren’t dumb and the audience isn’t going to be dumb either. Up’ing the ante isn’t enough, but again I’m already wrong because the movie has already done well at the box office.

I’ll take a moment here and be creative about what could have been done. You know these guys are going to get drunk. Why not make the audience drunk with them? Why not just have the movie begin with them waking up not remembering the night before. Do it differently. Why try to set things up with a “one week earlier” segment. It’s an absolute waste. Even if Ed Helms’ character was getting married all it would take is a phone call from the bride to be waking him up yelling on the phone “where the hell are you guys?!” Something simple but immediately places context. The audience already know what to expect, these guys don’t remember anything and it’s them recalling things step by step in a comical manner. Because whatever they did the night before was supposed to be hilarious by default.

Also above all else. It would’ve been far more interesting to have had Justin Bartha’s character involved this time around, especially with his promise to his wife at the end of the first movie of him not ever doing something like that again while he was married to her. So him breaking that promise and being excused is believable. It’s already believable that these guys would do stupid shit to begin with. That’s what the movie is completely about. Why replace with him Mason Lee at all? It’s such a waste. They didn’t have anyone to do damage control in the first film. It was just them dodging and making excuses. You didn’t have someone at Doug’s wedding physically there to calm down the bride and family, who was on ‘their team’. Even with Jeffrey Tambor’s character in the first film, you just assumed he knew cause it was “Vegas” and even his delivery of that line at the end of the first film is on point and an aside. It’s a comical gesture not brought to the limelight. You just accept it and know it. It’s a private secret between the audience and the “wolfpack”. Even the “wolfpack” is a secret club! You don’t go saying at the end of the movie “I’m apart of a Wolfpack”, it’s like talking about Fight Club and breaking the #1 rule of Fight Club. Saying “Bangkok” at the end isn’t enough to just quietly dismiss everything either, especially given who delivers the line in the sequel and the context of his involvement of the film. It just becomes unbelievable because the audience isn’t stupid. Yes, they want a stupid adventure, but everything about the sequel could have just been smarter. After all that’s what the first film was. It was clever.

Changing Alan’s character around and just having him ad-lib scenes is a waste too. He has no structure at all, his scenes aren’t funny because of it. He’s just being stupid it’s especially amplified at the end with crashing into the beach. It just becomes deliberately stupid in the hopes of being stupidly funny. Was it just for him to drop the anchor on the sand in the background? It’s not believable. Not to mention it’s endangering to the wedding party already in attendance. Are you telling me no one else on the boat would physically stop Alan from trying to slow down the boat at all? Especially Phil’s character? No one attending the family wouldn’t actually be upset about it? How about the hotel owners coming out to see what the large ‘bang’ was about? Am I just applying too much reason? Why does Alan have to be the guy who drugged them again? It was funny for a moment when Alan admits to not knowing what happened either. Here you have a crazy guy who might just act as he normally is, it’s potential for some lunacy. Instead you get him doing stupid things just being an idiot. His character degrades. He’s not the misunderstood brother-in-law. He’s the crazy brother-in-law. What was redeeming about him in the first movie, doesn’t exist in the second.

Even the photos at the end of the film are forcibly convenient with a cellphone being recharged. It’s an add-in. Made even worse by having Mason Lee be the guy to come in and say “guy’s I found photos” in absolutely dry manner. Could they not have cast John Cho? I know that’s stereotyping him in as the defacto Asian in comedies, but again your movie cost you $80 million. I can’t help but think his involvement would’ve been funnier, even in a subtle Mike Epps type of role. Not to mention Mike Tyson’s cameo at the end just makes things feel like this franchise jumped the proverbial shark. It was funny because it was a one time thing. He has a place in the first movie. Now it feels like he’s a forced character in the second film. It would not surprise me in the slightest if he was in the third film and drunk with the guys. He is no NPH from Harold and Kumar. Ed Helms is not Frank the Tank from Old School. Will Ferrell wins every time because of the sole fact that he’s charismatic. It’s not that the film needed cameos it needed supporting actors to help fill the void and delivery the comedy better. Maybe things just fell through when Mel Gibson was ousted, then Liam Neeson had scheduling conflicts. Neeson in the role he was supposed to play would’ve been hilarious I admit. Instead we got Nick Cassavetes, who isn’t the same type of casting you hoped for at all for a role intended for Gibson and then Neeson.

And honestly really, replacing Dan Finnerty’s hilarious wedding band with Mike Tyson doing karaoke? Really? Who did they think would appreciate this? The audience? The wedding party, friends, family in the film? Did a boardroom meeting happen and someone say “it’d be hilarious if we cast Mike Tyson again as a secret cameo!” He’s a terrible singer. Right up there with Mason Lee cringe-worthy scenes.

It’s a terrible movie, milking a movie that did incredibly well and will now seemingly milk again. But I guess Hollywood is cool with that. I guess movie-goers are cool with too. Or did I miss the memo and had to attend this film either (a) high, (b) drunk or (c) both to allow for enjoyability? It’s lazy and predicable, audiences deserve better.

About the author

Ghost Dad wrote 56 articles on this blog.

I was named after my grandmama!

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