The Hangover Part II

Rating: ***

Apparently lightening can strike twice. That’s the way it goes in The Hangover Part II, right down to the film’s opening minutes where Phil (Bradley Cooper) warns Tracy (Sasha Barrese) that a night debauchery went off the tracks and that the wedding party is one man short. This time the wedding is for Stu (Ed Helms), the game board is the Thai city of Bangkok, and the ubiquitous baby is replaced by a smoking monkey in a rhinestoned Rolling Stone denim vest.

Yes, The Hangover sequel unfolds pretty much how you expect it to, although fortunately the writers didn’t make Doug (Justin Bartha) the lost buddy for a second time. Bartha still gets to be part of the show, but not really part of the antics, which is more than can be said for Heather Graham, Stu’s lady love from the first film. Graham seems to have been jettisoned for Jamie Chung (Sucker Punch), if only to make the wedding trip to Thailand go over more plausibly.

But mostly, what works for the first Hangover is held over for part two. Phil, Stu and Alan (Zach Galifianakis) are re-united as the Wolfpack wakes up groggy and in pain in a Bangkok hotel after a night-long binge. Missing is Teddy (Mason Lee, son of Ang) the prodigal brother of Stu’s bride Lauren. Not missing is Mr. Chow (Ken Jeong), for all intents and purposes the villain of part one, and current pen pal of Alan, who it turns out is Alan’s plus one to the wedding. Apparently, meeting girls is hard when you’re a “stay-at-home son.”

The pack sets off to find Teddy, with only a few fragmented memories and a limited number of clues, like Stu’s unfortunate facial tattoo, Teddy’s severed finger, and a date, time and location for a meet written on Alan’s belly in permanent marker. Paul Giamatti pops up briefly as an associate of Mr. Chow’s; he may or may not be holding Teddy as a card till he can get money from Chow. Naturally, it keeps Phil, Stu and Alan’s Oz-like trip through Bangkok going for an extra 45 minutes, as the trio must overcome warnings that they may never get Teddy back. “Bangkok has him now,” people keep telling them, as if “Bangkok” is some kind of mystical force designed to keep outsiders wild, never allowing them to return to their buttoned up, Western lifestyles.

The chemistry between Cooper, Helms and Galifianakis is intact and used well. I enjoyed how director Todd Phillips resisted the urge to beef up the Alan part and expanding it ludicrously, taking advantage of Galifianakis’ breakout status from part one. In fact, Galifianakis’ re-intro was oddly muted. We find him alone, at home, with nothing but the memories (such as they are) and plastered pictures on the wall of the Wolfpack’s wild night in Vegas to sustain him through Phil and Stu’s silence. Galifianakis doesn’t overplay it either. He’s restrained and always stops himself from going to far over the top. Plus we get to go a little deeper into Alan’s dark side.

As for the film’s itself, this reviewer is still unsure what exactly to make of it. On the one hand, as Jimbo once observed, the whole thing smacks of effort. While they don’t go too over the top, Phillips is very calculating in taking some scenes to outrageous new directions; a scene in a Thai strip club is especially revealing, if you get my drift. I don’t remember beginning to end laughs like in the first Hangover, but that might be my memory playing tricks. Basically, if you liked the first movie, there’s really no reason why you wouldn’t enjoy the second.

The Hangover

Rating: ***1/2

On the surface, The Hangover is juvenile, ridiculous, and just a little low brow. Truly it is all that, but you know what? It’s actually pretty funny too. It’s a comedic perfect storm where three actors with good chemistry and timing, meet a funny script and a director that knows how to set up a joke. A nervous young woman is getting prepared for her wedding, and she gets a phone call from her husband-to-be’s best friend Phil (Bradley Cooper). Where are you, she asks, it’s five hours till the wedding. Yeah, Phil says as resignedly as possible, I don’t think we’re going to make that.

A comedic whodunit of sorts, the “heroes” of The Hangover asks two simple questions: what the heck happened to us last night, and how drunk were we? Phil, Stu (Ed Helms) and Alan (Zach Galifianakis) take Doug to Vegas for a bachelor party, and after a wild night consuming heroic amounts of alcohol, they wake up in their hotel suite without a single memory of what happened a few hours earlier. Oh, and Doug is missing. The guys slowly put together a vague idea of the events the prior night including Stu’s marrying a stripper (Heather Graham), kidnapping a tiger from Mike Tyson’s house, and ticking off a pair of Asian thugs. There was also a stay in the hospital, but how all these events tie together is hazy, and the whereabouts of Doug are still a mystery.

It’s not brilliant, but it’s really hilarious. A large amount of the credit goes to the actors for making you laugh with every revelation, every embarrassing situation, and every encounter with a character even more messed up then they are. The wonder is how easy they make their camaraderie seem on film; Cooper has never really been known for his broad physical comedy and Helms has always been more of a second banana than leading man material. Breakout status goes to Galifianakis, who’s been working diligently around Hollywood for a while, but makes a startlingly permanent impression here. I even laughed at the Mike Tyson cameo, even though I find the man pretty reprehensible. I guess the charm offensive between this and the new documentary Tyson is working.

Still though, there is something rather predictable about The Hangover, even the film sometimes itself acknowledges that events proceeding bear eerie similarity to something from another movie. It’s no big deal, and if you’re going to burrow, I always appreciate it when the script mans up and admits it. At the end of the day though, it’s all familiar in a good way. And in a film culture obsessed with the highly vaunted status of the PG-13, it’s also nice to see an R-rated comedy with the courage of its convictions. However, one can’t abide that a large swath of The Hangover veers wildly into some pretty low brow comedy with the aforementioned Asian gangsters that slur their English, as well as shrill, disagreeable girlfriends and strippers with a heart of gold.

But The Hangover stands on its own and is unquestionably funny enough to be enjoyable. Stick around through the end credits for a photo slideshow of vignettes from the boys’ lost weekend, which were surprisingly well done because usually when movies dangle the full revelation of the hidden detail, it has a habit of blowing up in our faces. However, The Hangover has a habit of beating the odds and it wins on the strength of its own simplicity and willingness to do just about anything for a laugh. It’s certainly not to everyone’s taste and it doesn’t stake out new ground in the Tipsy McStagger subgenre of college humour, but it’s genuinely funny and enjoyable in a bubbly crowd of theatre patrons eager for a laugh.