Dreadful rehash of the original

Rating: 3/10 (2 April 2012)

There's barely a laugh to be had in "The Hangover - Part 2," a dreadful sequel to the original box office smash from 2009.
This time the boys - and I do mean "boys" - are trapped in Thailand, where they've gone to celebrate Stu's nuptials and where they immediately fall into a series of misadventures after a riotous night of bachelor party celebration in Bangkok, all of which has been mysteriously erased from their collective memory.
I wish I could say that, from all this, hilarity ensues. But I would be lying. As with most big-budget studio comedies these days, the tone and the performances are pitched so over-the-top that the audience winds up feeling assaulted rather than entertained long before the closing credits come rolling by. To that end, the screenplay by Scot Armstrong, Craig Mazin and director Todd Phillips is filled with wheezy plot mechanics, overwrought action sequences, mind-numbing slapstick, and jokes that fall consistently flat.
The buddies are once again played by Bradley Cooper, Ed Helms, Zack Galifianakis and a much under-used Justin Bartha (who may have been the only one career-conscious and savvy enough to ask to be left out of most of the proceedings), while Paul Giamatti and Ken Jeong - who is much funnier on TV's "Community" - have been added to the cast.
By any standard but the most crassly commercial - the movie garnered an impressive quarter of a billion dollars in domestic box office receipts - "The Hangover - Part2" is a colossal bomb.