There’s 2 ways to take the Hangover 2. Firstly, pretend you’ve never, ever seen the original. Or secondly, just go with the flow and keep thinking they’ve replaced a tiger with a monkey, added a smidgen of new characters and swapped Vegas for Thailand. Frankly, for most, it’s going to be the latter. Not only did the original win the movie of the year back in the day on the radio show, it made shit loads of money. And as we all know by now, if something makes shit loads of money, there’s a sequel in it…at least. It was inevitable that this was going to happen. Honestly, I thought the original was a little over-rated, but lets get down to talking shite about the follow up.
The story goes this time round, the same way as the last one. Major booze up, wake up with no recollection of the night before and discover a member of the gang is gone missing. And of course it's Stu’s 16 year old brother in law to be thats disappeared. A number of hijinks ensue as they gang try and retrace their steps to find Teddy and get back in the time for Stu’s wedding. Couple this with a multitude of Bangkok stereotypical lady boys, ping pong balls etc. and you have a movie that will actually make you laugh out loud on a number of occasions. And while it’s almost a beat by beat copy of the original but it works.
The cast have the same chemistry as they had in the original and Todd Philipps keeps the thing moving at a similar pace as well. Solid, but nothing too pacy either. The gross out moments have been turned up a notch and there seems to be a few more in the sequel for good measure.
While the original was clever and unique to a point, I always felt there were probably more laughs in a movie that actually showcased the night of as opposed to the day after. So repeating the process in a “it happened again” way was a ballsy move, and to it’s credit, The Hangover 2 pulls it off…just. I don’t think they could do it again for a third time though. There’s something strangely compelling about the characters and they can easily charm the pants off an audience and that’s the only reason this works at all.
Overall, it’s the same old story, same old jokes and has monkeys and lady boys, but it brings the laughs and you could be doing alot worse for 102 minutes.
