Actual grade: 2/10
(For a full explanation of my grading system, check out this post.)
When The Hangover was released, it was a brotastic, trashy-fun, booze-fueled, Vegas-romping breath of fresh air. Was it a cinematic masterpiece? Perhaps not, but it was funny, felt new, and featured characters we all loved. Incidentally, it also became the highest-grossing R-rated movie of all time. Who wouldn't want to revisit that?
No one, as it turns out. The Hangover Part II grossed $105.8 million over its first four days, the single largest opening for a live-action comedy ever, and the fourth-best Memorial Day Weekend opening after only Pirates 3, Indiana Jones 4, and X-Men 3. But I have a sneaking suspicion that a lot, if not most, of the people who flocked to this film walked away feeling cheated. I certainly did.
Based on the trailers, I knew that this film had the same basic concept as the first: three guys get drunk, lose someone, and try desperately to find the missing guy after they wake up having no idea what happened the night before. But I was still expecting the film to find new ground... To take this concept to unexplored places and unexpected situations. Instead, what I got was a shockingly blatant, practically scene-for-scene reshoot of the first Hangover.
Not only does it share the same concept as the first film, it also steals the entire formula. The structure is the same -- film starts with a phone call, the line "We f****d up," then flashes back to a bachelor party. There's a black-out, then Bradley Cooper, Ed Helms, and Zach Galifianakis wake up in a trashed hotel room. There's bodily disfigurement, a random animal in the room, and a friend missing. Throughout the film there are over-the-top criminals, trade-offs that yield undesirable results, gratuitous male nudity, and Stu even has another escapade with strippers. The film reaches the phone call scene again just before the climax. In the end they find the missing person, race to make the wedding on time, and after the ceremony, finally find photographic evidence of the night before. The pictures then roll over the closing credits.
Sound familiar? It should. This film felt less like a sequel and more like a remake. A remake made only a few years after the original, starring all the same people, and relocated to a different city, but nevertheless exactly the same. The film even references this fact, with Bradley Cooper saying early on "It's happening again..." But a character pointing out a plot device doesn't make it any less of a plot device.
While all of this blatant copying is a crime, perhaps this film's biggest crime is that it just isn't funny. I laughed out loud maybe three times through the course of the hour and a half, and spent the remainder of the time wondering how I had been coerced into spending money to see a movie I'd already seen before. The one thing this movie tries to do differently is go even darker in its humor. The first one was rollicking in its absurdity, full of wedding chapels, gambling scenes, and little kids tasering grown men. Instead of trying to top that, this film attempts to find the humor in more dangerous, violent situations. There are severed fingers, death by drug overdose, disposing of bodies, police riots complete with tear gas and molotov cocktails, and main characters getting shot. It's remarkable how easily this film could have been a tragedy -- the only thing that made the dangerous situations funny were the characters' reactions. Put different characters in the same film, and you would have had a gritty Bangkok action flick.
But even the characters we loved so much the first time around couldn't save this film. Bradley Cooper is still charmingly relaxed, Ed Helms is still freaking out, and Zach Galifianakis is still the weird manchild. There is so little character development it's astonishing. Ed Helms, as the everyman, has the biggest character arc and at the end he finally works up the courage to verbally chew out his overbearing father-in-law...which is 100% the EXACT same place he reached at the end of the first film, when he finally works up the courage to verbally chew out his overbearing girlfriend. Released merely two weeks after the superb Bridesmaids, this lack of any depth is especially remarkable. Whereas Bridesmaids managed to find humor in a potentially depressing situation and at the same time show true character growth, this film is just about a bunch of boys behaving badly and coming out the other side with absolutely no consequences or change to speak of.
The Hangover Part II merely recycles a formula that worked the first time around, hoping for the same result again, and ends up falling sensationally short. It is offensive as a movie-goer to think that the producers and writers didn't think we'd notice that they simply made the same movie twice. But judging by how spectacularly they're being rewarded for their lack of effort, there's no reason we won't be treated to a Hangover Part III in a couple of years. I can only hope that we have learned our lesson and won't waste our money. Otherwise, studios will continue to churn out mindless dreck like The Hangover Part II -- and we'll deserve it.
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