Hangover 2 Review

[Westside Steve]

The Hangover 2

Warner Brothers

 

R 102 min

 

 

Well ‘tis the season for retreads. Yeah the big kickoff of summer with kids out of school barbecue boating family vacations; all that stuff.

So Hollywood needs to pry the movie going public off the beach and into a seat. They figure familiarity sells so it’s time for new installments of franchise (and soon to be franchise) titles.

Now as we’ll see in this issue there is more than one approach to that idea.

In this case THE HANGOVER 2 you take the same basic characters and put them in the same basic situation. Now that means if you didn’t like part one you probably aren’t going to like part two, and that’s true. However in this case if you liked the first one even a little bit, you should probably like this one maybe a little bit more. Why? Well basically because it’s a better movie.

Oh it’s the same bunch of mediocre actors and the same premise “what happened??????” but there’s actually a slightly interesting plot that at least approaches the genre of action thriller.

Here, uber dork Stu (Ed Helms) is about to be wed, inexplicably, to a hot rich girl at her wealthy family’s estate in Thailand.

Her dad hates him and his friends and if you saw HANGOVER 1 that’s understandable.

But dad loves his youngest son Teddy, a brilliant teenager who will wind up as the focus of the adventure.

The guys all decide to keep the bachelor festivities to one beer and, you guessed it, awaken in a squalid Bangkok completely unaware of the nights proceedings. The few clues to be unraveled include a silent monk an odd tattoo and Teddy’s severed ring finger. It isn’t a great mystery but it’s somewhat entertaining, since there are less fart puke and poop jokes to fill the time. And seriously you should have had enough of that in BRIDESMAIDS.

Don’t worry though; there’s still vulgarity aplenty and an extra helping of F bombs but this seems to be an adventure with vulgarity instead of an adventure IN vulgarity.

Also, Alan (Zach Galifianakis) is as big an a-hole as ever. It’s probably time for him to be concerned about typecasting, but he is funny in his own obnoxious way.

 

By the way the B minus is, of course, graded on the curve.

 

B-

 

WSS

 

Email westsidesteve@aol.com.