Blake Temple
Hangover 2 Review
“I have never been so let down by a movie, until I walked out of the theatre after watching the Hangover 2,” said Jared Vinson, a displeased audience member.
Most of the viewers were shocked and wondered how bad things could happen to such a good comedy. For director Todd Philips, the maker of Old School and The Hangover, this should have been another hit movie.
The original Hangover was a great slapstick comedy with enough raunchiness to earn its R-rated title. A wild bachelor party turns into a race against time when, Phil (Bradley Cooper), Stu (ED Helms), and Alan (Zach Galifinakis) wake up after a night of drugs and drunkenness to find the groom, Doug (Justin Bartha) missing, and attempt to find him in time to make it back to the wedding. The Hangover was an instant classic when it came out in 2009, grossing over $476 million in the box office.
So why was the sequel such a failure? If you saw the first film there’s not much need to describe the plot for this one. Director Todd Phillips took the same sequence of scenes and moved it from Las Vegas to Bangkok. Phillips also used the most climactic comedy scenes for the movie trailer, leaving the audience with nothing to anticipate.
“If you’ve seen any of the movie trailers, then you have pretty much seen the whole movie,” says Adam Carl, an audience member of the Hangover 2. The shock factor, which made the first film such a success, is completely missing this time around, leaving the viewer with predictable events and patterns that was taken from the original film.
There are only a few minor plot changes to the Hangover 2. This time Stu is getting married to Lauren (Jamie Chung), and is forced to bring Laurens little brother, Teddy (Mason Lee) to his bachelor party. This time they awake in a beat down hotel room in Bangkok, Stu has a tattoo on his face, Alan’s head is shaved, and Teddy is missing. In their search the boys experience everything from an ancient monastery, to a transvestite strip club.
If you liked the first one then you probably fell let down by the second, it has its funny moments and a few big laughs throughout, but overall it was very disappointing. Its downfall comes from the fact that you know all the punch lines in advance, and it seemed that Philips had the “give them more of what worked last time” mentality, nothing new was brought to the table making the Hangover 2 just a dulled down carbon copy of the original.