Very close to as good as the original

Rating: 9/10 (26 May 2011)

Just about everyone and their mother knows the original Hangover was amazing and one of the best comedies, possibly in all of film history (well of the past decade easily). This sequel is very strange in that it's hardly a sequel, it's more like a reworking.
They seemed to have used the exact same formula of the original, including major plot points and even what musicians soundtrack which scenes (there's a Kanye song playing on both when they're going out, there's a Wolfmother song playing again near the climax, that same singer with the eerie voice has a song at the beginning during the credits, after the "we screwed up" phone call), but somehow they managed to basically copy themselves without it feeling cheap.
I'm not sure how they achieved this, but as unoriginal as the film is, it just works. They basically took every crazy scene of the original and amplified times 100. Everything is absolutely insane, they're are definitely some things that will catch you by huge surprise. In some ways, this does indeed make this movie funnier and more action packed than the original, but what really made the Hangover so great was that the characters seemed very real, like you could see all of those things happening to you and your friends if you were at the wrong place at the wrong time, several times in a row.
That feeling of realistic characters and believable disasters is hardly present in the Hangover II, because the events are so extreme and the characters choices go past the morals of an average man (take into consideration that I believe the characters in the original were close to average men lol). If you haven't seen the first one though, you could possibly think this is one of the funniest movies ever.
So while it is funnier, it is less believable which takes away from some of the humor, but I still say it levels out to be about as good as the original.