The Hangover Part II

What’s old?
There’s a wedding to be had and on the bachelor night out, all the principals: Phil (Bradley Cooper), Alan (Zach Galifianakis), Stu (Ed Helms), Mr. Chow (Ken Jeong), Larry, Moe, Curly, Dom from Accounting, all lose a day because Alan has spiked their edibles. Would you guys stop inviting him along? You think you’d learn by now.  They wake up in a hotel room with one of their party missing and evidence all about them of things gone horribly wrong. They need to set all right in order to make the wedding on time. Sound familiar?

What’s new?
Bangkok.

Actually, one other new thing is a detached finger to match the detached tooth from the first Hangover; is this symbolic? Is this the producers of the first metaphorically giving us the finger? That’s kind of what it feels like, what with the complete lack of plot innovation here. This particular plot-driver shows up in the hotel room morning after. Who’s finger? Why? This would actually be a great plot device (if perhaps a tad derivative of films like Blue Velvet) were the basic Hangover format not followed to a T.

Instead of tromping around Vegas in search of their missing party, Phil, Alan and Stu, and capuchin monkey tossed in (“haven’t you always wanted a monkey?”), tromp around Bangkok in search of their missing party, who may or may not be missing a finger. In lieu of real innovation, the producers opted for decorative embellishment — Stu, the groom to be, sports a fresh Mike Tyson-like tattoo on the left side of his face, Alan is suddenly bald. Phil still looks like Phil, of course. I give some credit here: when you have Bradley Cooper in your movie, you let him go unshaven, maybe, but that’s it. You don’t ask a Victoria’s Secret model to wear an overcoat. And, just like Vegas, the “wolfpack” run into guns, gangsters and sex workers in R-rated adventures mildly unique to Bangkok. To quote an old joke, “there’s a reason the capital of Thailand ain’t ‘Thailand City’.” Which would be great if this were new. But it isn’t. Switch the tooth for a finger; switch the tiger for a monkey; switch the missing friend with a missing brother-in-law, switch Heather Graham for a – come to think of it, you don’t really want to know that one – and switch Mike Tyson for Mike Tyson.

I can’t let this one go – in a year with plenty of bad cameos (after all, Adam Sandler made two films in 2011), the worst has got to be Mike Tyson in The Hangover, Part II. The camp value from the first has elapsed, leaving us with an extended American Idol rejection scene. Except that nobody says, “get off the stage” to Mike Tyson and thus Mike at the Mic keeps going. If there’s a third Hangover, I beg the producers not to include Iron Mike.

Rated R, 102 Minutes
D: Todd Phillips
W: Craig Mazin, Scot Armstrong & Todd Phillips
Genre: Déjà vu
Type of person most likely to enjoy this film: Leonard from Memento
Type of person least likely to enjoy this film: “What’s a ‘tranny’?”