The Hangover Part II

My standing on this film as both a sequel and its own piece of performance art will be very clear to you in a few sentences. It is being dumped on by the media, whereas the first film was hailed "Brilliant", this one being deemed a waste of time and pointless. "We already saw this film 2 years ago" someone said. I say that is malarkey. You read right. MALARKEY!!!! Of course it is the same. Are we as audiences stupid? I say Nay! We knew what we were in for, and in my opinion it delivered perfectly. We knew the players and the game. What we did not know were the details from point A to point B. It does as brilliant a job of painting the scene as the first one did. The direction is very similar in the fact that we don't get to experience the night first hand, but through a series of clues our imaginations are able to run rampant. The dialog and jokes are just as good as 1, and they are fresh with several call backs that I thoroughly enjoyed. Once again Alan steals the show with his child like attitude and thought process. By misunderstanding or mishearing he causes more mayhem for the boys of summer. Stu is about to get married. Not to Heather Graham unfortunately, but to a beautiful Thai woman he believes to be his soul mate. He and "White" Doug, along with Phil and Alan travel to a beautiful resort in Thailand (pronounced Thy-land) for the wedding and then it happens again. They wake up in a seedy, dank hotel in Bangkok with no recollection of how they got there. The biggest problem with this is the person they are missing this time. The future brides 16 year old brother. He is the pride and joy of their Father, who happens to hate Stu before this even happens. They have 2 days to figure it out, find him, and get back for the nuptials. He knows he cannot go back without him and thus the new adventure begins. The visuals are a little better than the first one because of the setting. Bangkok instead of Vegas is a drastic difference. A smoking, dealing monkey instead of a tiger and so on. The biggest issue they have is figuring out how they ended up in this situation again, considering the bachelor party entailed 5 guys splitting a single 6 pack of Budweiser on the beach. I would have liked to see Doug involved in the shenanigans, but alas he was wiser than the others. Leslie Chow shows back up and is brilliant as the Asian gangster once again. They were about 3 scenes that had me rolling, and another 3 that had me shocked [in a great way]. The entire movie movies quickly and the soundtrack is done well, which is pretty usual for Todd Phillips films. Stu has another original tune, and the credits are better than the first film. If you are offended easily or you thought the first Hangover was right on the line, then this film is not for you. It takes that line and sets it on fire with boundary pushing vengeance and furious Humor. I rated the first the HIGHEST rating we use for it's originality, but for this sequel that is so much fun, but with little "new" aspects...

NBM rates The Hangover Part II - Phenomenal