From the opening scene where Phil (Bradley Cooper) calls his wife from a Bangkok rooftop and says “Honey, it happened again,” “The Hangover Part II” takes off as a brilliantly implausible, over-the-top mystery-comedy. It’s better than the original — which started strong but petered out at the end — precisely because it goes further into the realm of stupid.
The idea of a group of friends blacking out and then gradually piecing the previous night together is just plausible enough for one comedy, but it’s obviously too much to repeat the premise in a sequel. And that’s exactly why it’s so funny. Granted, a law of diminishing returns will eventually kick in, perhaps as soon as “Part III,” but for now, it works.
As the trio wakes up in a squalid Bangkok hotel room, the clues — funny in themselves — are that Stu (Ed Helms) has a Mike Tyson facial tattoo, Alan (Zach Galifanakis) has a shaved head, Stu’s bride’s brother Teddy’s finger is floating in a bucket of water, and cocaine-abusing Asian stereotype Chow (Ken Jeong) is passed out on the floor. Oh, and there’s a monkey.
The first movie had a human villain; in “Part II” the adversary is the city of Bangkok. As Bangkok residents tell the gang several times as they search for Teddy: “Well, it looks like Bangkok has him.” It’s a relief that this is a comedy, because Bangkok truly does seem like a place that could swallow a person whole; it would make a frightening setting for an espionage/action movie, so much so that I wouldn’t want to watch it.
Bangkok is an appropriate setting for a movie that pushes things as far as they can possibly go. Sure, there are some standard comedy set-ups, such as the gorgeous Lauren (Jamie Chung) falling for Stu, and Lauren’s dad despising Stu. But what the gang discovers when they revisit the strip club they had apparently patronized the night before suggests that the series really can’t go much further in “Part III.”
“Part II” isn’t merely a funnier movie than the original, though. It took me a while to warm up to the characters in the first one; here, I was on board from the beginning, embracing the trio’s chemistry. Phil is the still-rather-selfish straight man, Stu is the good guy with bad luck and Alan is the wild card man-child. In one inside-his-head sequence, we finally understand Alan, and it makes him more endearing.
With “The Change-Up,” “Horrible Bosses” and “Bad Teacher” still to come, “The Hangover Part II” looks like it’s just the start of a summer full of absurdist comedies. If they’re all as good as this one, we’ll be laughing a lot in 2011.
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