Movie Review: The Hangover Part 2
There’s a lot of people who are going to tell you that The Hangover Part 2 doesn’t work as a movie because it is just too similar to the original. And they’re both right and wrong.
They’re right in that The Hangover Part 2 is a structurally identical film. Literally. Not just in the basic rhythms — the idea of the group waking up in a foreign locale, missing someone days before a wedding. Rather, a number of the plot beats here are repeated, to the extent that I’m genuinely curious what you’d see if you played the two films side-by-side. In fact, if they didn’t reference the events of the original so many times, you could practically call this a remake.
And yet… I’m okay with this. The Hangover Part 2 did not leave me cold because of its similarities to the original. Rather, it left me unsatisfied (as a big fan of the original, I might add) because it does the one thing I feel the original avoided: it becomes conventional.
There’s something really mean-spirited and nasty about much of Todd Phillips’ work that I genuinely appreciate. It’s easy to forget, but Phillips cut his teeth on documentaries like Hated and Frat House, which refuse to shy away from frequently ugly subject matter. Old School still holds up today not just because of the chemistry of the core group of guys, but because Phillips is willing to take every joke just a little bit farther (resulting in one main character having their life destroyed by the end of the film, and three others dead). The Hangover worked for me because it appropriated this darkness on two levels: the main trio was left without a straight man to tone down its douchebaggery, and resultantly, they spent the majority of the film getting punished for their actions. And Due Date, a film that I don’t think completely works as a cohesive whole, is most intriguing in this sense, because it subverts the typical road movie dynamic by making the lead (Robert Downey Jr.) a huge tool. While I don’t think the film’s tonal shifts were executed successfully, I admired how it was willing to try and extract laughs from having Downey punch a small child in the stomach. There’s no burying the lead in a Todd Phillips picture, or at least an R-rated one.
This is why, from the beginning of The Hangover Part 2, I thought I might enjoy it more than the first. The opening credits are scored to a great new Glenn Danzig song (and kudos to music supervisors George Drakoulias and Randall Poster, as well as Phillips, for scoring that), as cinematographer Lawrence Sher captures Bangkok in all its grungy, grimy glory. The first was one of the most well shot comedies I’ve ever seen, and this one ups the ante in that respect. The first few scenes play well, as the main group of guys have clearly settled into their roles, and are allowed to ease the audience back into the world of The Hangover. Then they wake up in Bangkok, and it seems like the stakes are higher than those of the first film. This time there isn’t just a tiger and a baby in their room — now there’s a severed finger and a drug-peddling monkey to contend with. The bachelor party antics of the first film seem to have been elevated closer to something closer to Peter Berg’s deliciously disturbed Very Bad Things.
But then… well, I myself am not exactly sure where the problem is. Because there are a number of great dark payoffs to these jokes throughout the bulk of the film, as they try and solve the mystery of the night before (the majority of which involving Ed Helms’ poor character, Stu). However, by the time Stu’s arc is completed and he makes his big speech and so on and so forth, I felt like I was in something closer to an Adam Sandler movie, in contrast to the subtly transgressive vibe of the rest of the film. Maybe that’s partly the fault of the structure — that some of the shenanigans which felt fresh the first time feel stale this go-round. In the first film, the structure felt secondary to the gags and the characters. Here, those two things feel secondary to fulfilling the structural beats of the first film. As a result, there’s a lot of aimless wandering around Bangkok this time (albeit well shot wandering, props to Sher again) without much of a comedic payoff.
There are some payoffs though, and good ones. Stu takes the brunt of the abuse in the journey this time, with Phil (Bradley Cooper) getting off easy in context with a mere gunshot to the arm. Even now as I write this, I’m chuckling at some of the surprises from the film, and wondering why they left me feeling largely unsatisfied by the end. I don’t know if it’s the fault of the derivative structure or not, but maybe that’s the point. In a movie like this, the plot machinations should be secondary to the characters and the jokes. And in the first one, the plot twists were the jokes. Here… I don’t know. But you can’t call the creators of The Hangover mad though. Because they did almost the same thing twice, to fairly different results.
