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As our former president once said, “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me… You can’t get fooled again.”
Well, apparently The Hangover’s bachelor-partying wolfpack isn’t quite as smart as George W. Bush—because they’ve been fooled into another morning-after adventure in the all-too-familiar sequel, The Hangover Part II.
This time, the guys head to Thailand, where mild-mannered dentist Stu (Ed Helms) is about to marry the love of his life, Lauren (Jamie Chung)—much to the chagrin of her disapproving father.
Stu wants nothing to do with the wild and crazy partying that resulted in his last marriage, but he eventually agrees to have a beer on the beach with his friends. The next thing he knows, he’s waking up in a cheap hotel in Bangkok with a serious hangover and new tattoo. Phil (Bradley Cooper) and Alan (Zach Galifianakis) are there, too—but all that’s left of his future brother-in-law, Teddy (Mason Lee), is his severed finger.
If you’ve seen The Hangover, you know what comes next: the three scramble to put the various pieces of their night together in an attempt to find Teddy and get Stu to his wedding on time.
Basically, The Hangover Part II is just a slight rewrite of The Hangover. There are a few small substitutions—Bangkok instead of Vegas, a drug-dealing, cigarette-smoking monkey instead of a baby—but it’s pretty much the same movie. Even the cast is the same—right down to an appearance by Ken Jeong’s Mr. Chow, another memorable Mike Tyson cameo, and the absence of Justin Bartha’s Doug, who manages to avoid the whole fiasco. There are a few small additions—like a mute old monk and a blackmailing tough guy played by Paul Giamatti—but none of them add anything new or particularly noteworthy to the adventure.
Fortunately, though, Helms steps up his game, carrying much of the film as the hilariously hysterical groom. He even manages to take some of the attention away from Galifianakis and his obnoxiously spoiled man-boy Alan, who’s mostly kept to sight gags and one-liners.
The story, meanwhile, is designed to be even more extreme than the original, with more nudity and more scenarios to make you cringe. The various stops along the way are just as random as ever, but the adventure just doesn’t feel as twisted and surprising as the original—because, well, it’s been done before.
Of course, it’s still good for a few laughs—especially if you love director Todd Phillips’s brand of outrageous comedy. But unless you’ve lost your memory of The Hangover, you won’t find a whole lot of surprises in The Hangover Part II. You could just as well skip the lines at the theater, pop your own corn (and butter it just the way you like it), and watch The Hangover on Blu-ray instead.
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