It was never going to be up to the standard of the original, but it was hard to think it would fall this short of the mark

Rating: 2/10 (17 January 2012)

STAR RATING: ***** Saturday Night **** Friday Night *** Friday Morning ** Sunday Night * Monday Morning
'The Wolfpack' return, this time with Doug (Justin Bartha) engaged to a beautiful Thai girl and descending on the city for a weekend of the wild partying they'll always be remembered for from the first film. But when one of their group goes missing again, they're thrown into another series of wild escapades, involving their old friend Mr. Chow (Ken Jeong) a ruthless gangster (Paul Giamatti) and Mike Tyson!
For the wonderful gems it sometimes churns out, it's easy to forget that Hollywood is fundamentally a business in the area of making money. So while an occasional film like The Hangover may come alike that was a far bigger hit than anyone could have imagined and developed it's own cult following, it's almost a forgone conclusion that they will want to cash in on this and make a sequel that will be commercially quite successful and likely to have a big box office opening weekend, but artistically will be quite a failure in light of it's inspiration. And no doubt director Todd Phillips's ego was spurred on with what a runaway success his first film was and was happy to go along with it and thought he could manage the same success twice. And so we have The Hangover Part II which is basically everything The Hangover was...but isn't.
The formula from the first film is repeated almost exactly, as it often is, with the location simply switched from Las Vegas to Thailand, but this in itself feels like enough to feel down on it, with the bright lights and dazzling spectacle of the world's gambling capital replaced with the more diluted, down played back drop of the far east. But most crucially the laugh quotient is significantly down, with the set ups and delivery simply failing to work the way they did the first time round.
The characters are basically the same, Bradley Cooper's Phil the smooth, charming one, Zach Galifianakis's boorish buffoon getting up to his usual antics and, of course, Bartha's Doug the mild mannered, unwitting one who ends up going mad, as well as a few of the novelty characters from the first film re-introduced, but none to the effect of the first film. To try and liven things up a bit, at the end we have the baffling spectacle of Mike Tyson performing his own little live music stint.
The Hangover Part II is simply a sequel that is unsurprisingly not as good as the original. Sadly, it's not by a mile and then some. *