The Hangover Part II (2011) dir. Todd Phillips
Starring: Bradley Cooper, Ed Helm, Zach Galifinakis, Justin Bartha, Ken Jeong

***

By Alan Bacchus

Not only is this film ‘not that bad’, it’s actually a very funny and worthy successor to the original. Of course, I’m coming at this months after its near unanimous vilification by critics, yet it was a resounding box office success with audiences. So what gives?

What seems to be cited most often in the negative reviews is the template-like methodology this sequel places itself into. Beat-for-beat, The Hangover Part II repeats the formula of the first film, like déjà vu or perhaps a Groundhog Day time loop. Is it as fresh as the original? No. But while some saw this as shamelessly uncreative, I found this approach strangely appropriate, providing a level of comedy befitting the original film. Let’s remember, The Hangover was funny, but no masterpiece, certainly not sacred material, and thus ripe for the kind of repetitive comedy used in other movie franchises, such as James Bond, Austin Powers, Back to the Future and a half-century of situation comedies on television.

And to qualify the television reference, this film is by no means small screen material. There is some awesome cinematic comedy on display, appropriately pushing the boundaries of good taste and decency for comedic purposes. And it always stays on the right side of comedy.

The fact is, the ‘wolf pack’ in this picture – Phil, Stu and Alan, all losers incapable of holding their liquor and drugs and susceptible to the vices and temptations of man – are delightfully lovable. In the first film this trio made for a fun lampooning of the thin line between the feint veil of social maturity and the primal nature of our male desires. And here, the fact that the same thing happens to these guys again is a sad reminder or the failings of man.

Moving the situation over to Thailand appropriately ups the stakes. The exotic foreign location and xenophobic cross-culture fears of middle Americans adds a level of unpredictability that’s not present in the relative safety of Las Vegas. There's also ample room to exploit some fun ethnic stereotypes – all very lightly and fairly. Bringing back Mr. Chow (Ken Jeong) as the fey Asian coke addict who finds himself embroiled in the wolf pack's journey is key to this.

The missing person in this film turns out to be Teddy, Stu's soon-to-be brother-in-law and his father-in-law's prized possession – a genius teenager destined to fulfil his father's dreams. And so, after they wake up from their substance-influenced amnesia night of hell with Teddy gone missing, Stu's life comes crashing down.

The monkey featured in the poster makes for some good ol’ 'simian' humour involving mimicking human behaviour, which historically always makes for good comedy. Phillips even engineers a truly fantastic car chase in the mix, racing a motorcycle through the streets of Bangkok.

Not all of the gags score, specifically Mike Tyson's appearance in the end and Paul Giamatti's casting as an American gangster. But the authentic locations and the genuine warmth and chemistry of the three actors make this picture highly watchable and undeserving of such critical lambasting. So just chill out and enjoy The Hangover Part II.

The Hangover Part II is available on Blu-ray and DVD from Warner Home Entertainment.

The Hangover Part II (2011) dir. Todd Phillips
Starring Bradley Cooper, Ed Helms, Zach Galifianikis, Justin Bartha, Ken Jeong, Paul Giamatti, Nick Cassavetes and convicted rapist Mike Tyson

*

By Greg Klymkiw

The boys are back in town. This time it’s not Vegas, but Bangkok.

Surprise. Surprise.

The unexpected comedy hit of 2009 has a sequel.

The Hangover was a fuel-injected, insanely hilarious and almost perfect combination of fish out of water humour, gross-out laugh-grabbers and irresistible bro-mantic styling that took the world by storm and never looked back.

Alas, it looked ahead – to more through-the-roof box office grosses – and frankly, in spite of the earning potential, there really was no other reason to resurrect these characters in the same formula in another city. None whatsoever! Especially since its makers already created a movie that was so original - a tired retread is the last thing one would expect.

Since the first picture delivered endearing characters, it's no stretch to believe that audiences would want to see them again. In The Hangover, Phil (Bradley Cooper), Stu (Ed Helms), Alan (Zach Galifianakis) and Doug (Justin Bartha) are a wolf pack of mismatched buddies who end up in Las Vegas to have one last blowout before one of them gets married. Under the influence of copious amounts of booze and drugs, the groom-to-be mysteriously disappears and the other pals, all suffering from hazy hangovers, try to piece together their “lost weekend” and find their missing friend. As the film proceeds, more and more of their adventures come back to them and oh, what a night it was!

The comedy writing was so sharp, funny and unabashedly crude that one assumed the filmmakers would find an entirely new adventure for these guys. These characters deserved better than what this sequel gives them.

In the first film, Phil had a clearly defined character and one that all in the audience (not just "bros'") could relate to - that of the handsome young man who feels caught in what has become the "trap" of comfort and complacency. In the second film, he seems less a character, lost - not because of any clever writing that explores a sense of wayward loss, but because the filmmakers have lazily deciding to let the affable charm of leading man Bradley Cooper carry the picture.

Stu was a great character in the first film - a complacent dentist, a nebbish in a relationship with a gorgeous, but nasty harridan-in-the-making. He eventually discovers a repressed side of his personality that gives him considerable strength. Here, he's a nebbish once more, only now he has found love and faces the conflict of winning over his tight-assed father-in-law. While one could argue that this is a slightly new direction - especially since his adventures here lead to the discovery of a "dark side", his journey is far less interesting as the hurdle seems relatively low-stakes. Sure, there are high stakes involved in the wedding itself being scuttled, but this seems like a convenient extension of his character's "need".

Alan in the first Hangover picture was the archetypal "wild man" - alternately naive and knowing. The character also signaled the big-screen arrival of a comic force to truly be reckoned with in the form of the brilliant and funny Zach Galfianakis. He's certainly the getter of the bigger laughs in this chapter of the tale, but he now seems like an archetype that's had a mix of character traits assigned to him that are supposed to flesh him out. They only seek to confuse the issue and the audience is forced to fall back on the pure archetype and Galfiankis's comic gifts.

In the original picture, Doug was the missing groom and now he has been relegated to the role of the guy who stays behind and acts as a buffer zone between the guys and the gals as they communicate their predicament via cel phone. He seemed barely a character the first time around, but now is reduced to a mere device.

The "missing man" turns out to be the younger brother of Stu's gorgeous Asian fiancee. He's the apple of the family's eye and his disappearance definitely adds much needed repercussions to the narrative. That said, the narrative is essentially rooted in the exact same formula of the first movie - boringly, unimaginatively repeated, only this time in Bangkok rather than Vegas. This truly does not a good movie, nor sequel, make.

Insane and over-the-top as The Hangover was, it actually had a sense of credibility going for it, which, in this sequel, is thrown completely out the window. Okay, so it’s a gross-out bro-mance, you say. Who needs credibility? Well, I’d argue that it was that very credibility that made the proceedings in the first movie so damned funny. Here, all we get are intermittent gags within the now-tired formula that are genuinely, albeit infrequently, funny.

The full house I saw it with sat silently through much of the movie with smatterings of scattered laughter and a few humongous collective belly laughs. For the most part, the overall disappointment was quite palpable. Maybe the movie WILL die the horrible death it deserves, but I'm not going to put money on that.

Look, I’m all for offensive, politically incorrect humour, but this sequel managed to make even me want to become a card-carrying Bleeding Heart PC-Nazi. I’m even a huge fan of ethnic stereotypes used for gags, but this movie manages to very unpleasantly go beyond the pale, even for me. When such humour is used successfully, it casts a mirror upon ourselves and allows its characters to come to new understandings.

No such thing happens here.

In The Hangover Part II, petty bourgeois American values rear their heads far too often. Here we essentially have a group of well-to-do young men from America in a land so foreign to them that while watching this movie one gets increasingly sickened to see joke after joke tossed off at the expense of all the squalor and poverty around these characters.

In a city (Bangkok) and country (Thailand) renowned for its illegal sex tours for paedophiles and bearing the huge weight and disgrace of sexual slavery, it soon becomes draining and yes, nasty, unnecessarily offensive and downright appalling to see one joke after another at the expense, not only of the poverty around the main characters, but by extension, of those who continue to suffer under the yoke of sexual exploitation.

The endless cudgel of Asian stereotypes was funny a couple of times, but to have it play out all the way through the movie was beyond any reasonable tolerance level for such humour. Ken Jeong as the fey Asian gangster party boy Chow is, to be sure, a stereotype, but in the first outing he was used sparingly and within the context of the narrative, he was an example of an "offensive" element that seemed rooted - not only in story, but as a reasonable credible addition to the anarchy. Here, he is overused to a point of distraction. While Jeong is a brilliant comic actor, his first appearance in the sequel was pleasing - in so far as he is a delightful presence - but alas, he becomes the primary whipping boy for milking offensive stereotypes, especially in the gags involving his microscopic penis.

I feel little need at this point to list all these stereotypes. The movie does are more than sufficient job at utilizing and perpetuating them.

Frankly, the makers of this film should be ashamed of themselves. They won’t be, of course, since The Hangover Part II is almost sure to make money and thus justify the producers' unimaginative retread of the same idea in the context of thumbing its nose at cultures different than their own. If there had at least been an attempt to turn the tables on the insular ignorance of the American characters as a significant part of the humour, this otherwise boneheaded reprise might have worked in a passable fashion. That, however, might have taken something resembling intelligence - which, by the way, it takes to make great stupid comedies. (Mel Brooks, ZAZ, Farelly Brothers anyone?)

Fish out of water is one thing, but to glorify insular American ignorance and crudity without any of the characters or the audience genuinely breaking through the stereotyping and good-naturedly coming to a true understanding of the very different cultural experience they undergo is not only borderline evil, but mean-spirited and racist.

Oddly enough, the film’s producers, with the support of many cast members, decided to fire Mel Gibson from a cameo appearance in the film after his last public outburst of alcohol-and-violence-charged racially insensitive comments. It didn’t stop these people from making a film as racist and insensitive as Gibson’s outbursts. But even more hypocritical and disgusting, they were more than happy to reprise a Mike Tyson cameo from the previous film. In The Hangover, Tyson’s appearance was credible AND funny. In that film, Tyson was the owner of the tiger our crazed heroes steal. In spite of Tyson's real-life crimes, one was almost able to look past them (or even incorporate them) into the excess of both Vegas, America and Tyson himself. In the sequel, his cameo is not only gratuitous, but lacking in any sort of the wacko credibility that made it work so well the first time around.

Most regrettably, Tyson's appearance in The Hangover Part II is proof positive of how disingenuous the actions of the filmmakers were in giving Mel Gibson the boot from the cameo appearance as the tattoo artist (replaced by Liam Neeson and further replaced by Nick Cassavetes). Mike Tyson is not only a disgraced former heavyweight boxing champion, but he is a convicted rapist.

Tyson duped, forcibly confined, brutalized and raped an 18-year-old woman.

Nobody on the creative team of The Hangover Part II seems to have had a problem with that and to reiterate, Tyson's cameo was an excellent comment on the excess of Vegas and show business in general. He was playing himself and using him was cleverly rooted in the narrative. Here, there is barely a narrative, just a pallid retread job so that's really the only reason for him to be here. Gibson, on the other hand, would have been playing an actual part. That said, he might have been a good enough sport to play Mel Gibson - reduced to working as a tattoo artist in Bangkok after his numerous falls from grace. Chances are, though, nobody on this team thought about doing that. They just reacted in a knee-jerk fashion to another of Mel's rants and dumped him. Keeping the rapist was fine though.

This, of course, speaks volumes about the kind of foul, indecent and duplicitous thinking that went into the making of this film. I'm the first to defend political incorrectness when it's funny and has some sort of point beyond indulging in a few cheap laughs. Lots of cheap laughs might have been slightly preferable, but that's not the case here. It's a bad movie - period. That's certainly not worth defending. Accepting the above hypocrisy of dumping Gibson, but keeping a "good-natured" rapist in the film is indefensible to the extreme.

My hope would be that any future sequel might actually have a story for the characters from the first film and that anything that happened here could just be ignored.

I'm not going to hold my breath.

The Hangover Part II is currently in wide release through Warner Brothers.

Due Date (2010) dir. Todd Phillips
Starring: Robert Downey Jr., Zach Galifianakis, Jamie Foxx, Michelle Monaghan

***

By Alan Bacchus

The perceived failure of this picture notwithstanding, Due Date is actually a pretty decent film. Perhaps the sleepy critical and audience reception stems from the fact that there’s very little we haven’t seen in this film that isn’t in all other road/buddy pictures which came before it. Much has been made of the similarities between this and Planes, Trains and Automobiles. And sure, perhaps this film is an unofficial remake of said John Hughes classic, but so what, it’s certainly not stale bread and is actually a lot of fun.

The Todd Phillips brand of broad physical comedy and a strong ‘heart’ binds this picture together. And certainly the affability of both actors (Galifianakis and Downey) make each of it’s scant 90mins easily watchable and entertaining.

I don’t know how much range Mr. Galifianakis has an actor, and perhaps his shelf life is limited in traditional feature films, but Due Date is the perfect vehicle for him. In The Hangover, he was the wild card, who had timing good enough to have his zingers stick. In Due Date, he’s one half of the film in what really is the exact same role as in The Hangover, by way of his online persona on the Between Two Ferns series.

The story goes like this, Downey plays a stuck up right-brained architect Peter Highman wh,o before a flight back to LA gets kicked off the plane for fighting with an obnoxious passenger, but in the melee loses his wallet, ID, money, credits and everything else. The only way he can make it to the birth of his child is by teaming up with the same person who got him kicked off the plane in the first place. This is Ethan Tremblay (Galafinakis) a doofus of extraordinary proportions who desires to move to Hollywood to start an acting career. All he has with him are his ludricrous headshots, a coffee can containing his father’s ashes and a french bulldog.

The actual gags are perfunctory speedbumbs along the road. Stuff like the comedy of errors with homeland security, Ethan’s masterbating dog and even dialogue like, “if you are allergic to waffles, don't eat them. Then don’t take me to a waffle house’, which was quoted in every trailer, isn’t really funny. And we know Ethan’s ashes will be mishandled and either consumed or bathed in at some point in the film. These are all rehashed gags from other comedies and are not the highlights of the film.

What works is the dynamic between Downey and Galifianakis, like the Steve Martin/John Candy relationship the trajectory from 100% conflict to sincere admiration and friendship for each other is surprisingly heartwarming and delightful. Todd Phillips saves us from the schmaltz of the Hughes movie, his trademark chaotic tone remains, and at 90+mins it’s not a minute too long.

The fact this movie was squeezed in between the two Hangover movies is evident. The movie seems rushed, and according to interviews with Phillips it seems as if the script was essentially rewritten as the film went along. But Phillips’ casting of the leads and the careful placement of a few key cameos, including a fun turn by Phillips himself, makes it all satisfying and a decent rental.

Due Date is available on Blu-Ray and DVD from Warner Home Entertainment