The funniest, most reckless moments in The Hangover Part II, the largely mirthless sequel to the 2009 hit The Hangover, take place in the final credits, when still images flash by detailing the latest misadventures of the story’s overgrown lost boys. The outrages, most of which are once again carefully elided in the actual movie, involve a slipped knife, a tribal tattoo and Thai bar girls performing specialized party tricks. The final credits are the time when viewers meander or flee from the theater or sit in stunned or ecstatic silence or chattering communion. Here the credits just emphasize how deeply square this flick is.
Like the first movie, the new one involves a groom — here, the formerly married Stu (Ed Helms) — who, on the eve of his own wedding, experiences various forbidden pleasures. In other words, he briefly escapes his mundane reality as a nice-guy dentist before settling down with a soon-to-be wife, Lauren (Jamie Chung). As before Stu’s companions are a pretty boy, Phil (Bradley Cooper), and an odd duck, Alan (Zach Galifianakis), whose straight-man-and-dummy dynamic works along the lines of an R-rated Abbott and Costello. Stu, by contrast, is the everyman who journeys into the dark night — now, the jammed streets and clubs of Bangkok — on his way to enlightenment, though more likely another sequel.
The director Todd Phillips, who wrote the new Hangover with Craig Mazin and Scot Armstrong (the first was credited to Jon Lucas and Scott Moore), cleaves numbingly to the script of the previous movie. Stu, with Phil, Alan, another friend, Doug (Justin Bartha) and Stu’s teenage future brother-in-law, Teddy (Mason Lee), shares drinks, toasting his fast-approaching nuptials. A few edits later, and he, Phil and Alan are groggily waking up in a wrecked hotel room, as they did in the first movie, only this time there’s a capuchin monkey on board instead of a baby. Shrieks and panic ensue as the friends try to figure out what happened, where Teddy is and how a human finger ended up without its hand.
If you superimposed a diagram that mapped out all the narrative beats, characters and jokes in The Hangover Part II over one for The Hangover, the two would align almost perfectly. Banking on the studio adage that there’s no success like a previous box office hit, Phillips and company dutifully recycle the first movie to increasingly diminishing ends that include the baby-now-monkey, the giggly, swishy gangster Mr Chow (Ken Jeong) and the obligatory, obliging anti-wives (i.e., whores). Paul Giamatti shows up, as do Jeffrey Tambor, Mike Tyson, the director Nick Cassavetes and assorted extras filling in for monks, gangsters, strippers, merchants and gawkers. There’s a car chase, and at one point the monkey takes a computer-generated smoke, doubtless to take its mind off the movie.
Phillips throws in one good visual joke in a flashback that reveals how Alan, an overgrown child of privilege, sees himself and his friends. Galifianakis is a naturally funny screen presence, and he gives Alan a strong current of menace, turning him into a combustible teddy bear whose naivete ignites all the trouble and serves as its convenient excuse. A walking, toddling id, the guy can’t help it, and neither can the friends he accidentally on purpose drags into his mess. In The Hangover and The Hangover Part II grown men cast off the shackles of everyday existence, leaving behind girlfriends, wives, parents and jobs in order to play, feel, live, which is why these nominal comedies are better thought of as tragedies.
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