The Hangover: Part II

Do we recall The Hangover? Well, they did it again.

In what is such a rerun of a sequel that it's practically a remake, we follow the same bunch of idiots who get so blotto on a stag night that they wake in the morning with no idea what happened last night, and with one of their number missing. A few details are changed; a different one of them is getting married, the stag night is in Bangkok not Vegas, and the missing person is the bride's brother, not the groom. All else is the same. And that's not absolutely the wrong thing to do; in Die Hard 2, John McClane couldn't believe the same kind of crap could happen to him twice, and he had a point. With this, if you give the same bunch of idiots alcohol, it's not inconceivable that they'll wake up in dire straits again. It's a repeatable experiment.

Not quite the same, of course. In that this movie is out to trump its earlier incarnation in many respects. So, the humour is broader, blacker, crasser, and more insensitive. Which might sound like a criticism, and if you've no tolerance of that kind of mularkey, it is a criticism. However, if you're interested in a film about three idiots going off the rails on a stag night, Crass Up or Go Home, I say. The only way to make it funny twice is to push it harder.

Taking a look at my portable laughometer, which I take with me to all films*, I can see that I laughed about 75%-80% as often as I did with The Hangover, that on average, these laughs were only about 10% less hard than the laughs for the original, but analysis of the timbre of the laughs suggests that the laughs were about 10-15% more evil this time.

In an odd way, I am minded of the film Saw, and its sequels. The original was a grisly bit of torture porn, but mostly held up as a movie that normal people could like, because of the interesting gameplaying proposition play scenario. The sequel, however, was less broad ranging in appeal, and appeals mostly to those who were fans of the first, and attempts to give them more. And of course, by film six of the franchise, we're reduced to just the sick fucks who like watching mutilations. Well, I imagine the Hangover franchise like that. The first has a broad appeal as a buddy movie, for all it's black slapstick, the second will appear more to people who specifically enjoy black slapstick. If it goes any further along these lines, it really will only appeal to fans of Dirty Sanchez, but we're still early enough in the sequence to appeal to people with only borderline personality disorders**.




* - lie
** - that is, me.