I still have a hangover from The Hangover Part II. Initially it went down a lot like 2009’s The Hangover, which is to say, tasteless and comically potent. Three men again retrace their missteps of their blacked out previous night, looking for a missing member of a wedding party as the ceremony approaches. Set in Thailand, the sequel is darker and tawdrier than the original and not quite as uproarious. Aiming for replication, it can’t help being mannered. Every dirty word arrives with a sense of calculated bravado; every gander at flapping male genitalia might as well be accompanied by trumpets.
Most of the laughs go down easily. Most. Not the one where someone calls a Middle Easterner a camel jockey. And a bit that makes 1992’s The Crying Game look restrained mainly illuminated how comfortable the filmmakers are with homophobia. Stu (Ed Helms), Phil (Bradley Cooper, the handsomest lizard in America) and Alan (Zack Galifianakis) handled a fresh corpse and a gunshot wound with more aplomb than they did the revelation that someone they knew had sex with a man. (Accidentally! Kind of.) And when I looked in the mirror the next day, I realized I’d consumed too many shots of a pet monkey doing awful things. According to Alan, “when a monkey nibbles on a penis it’s funny in any language,” but actually it’s only funny the first time. Then it just feels perverted and cruel.
The slender plot serves only to get the group to a place where sin is readily available. Having been liberated from a harridan in the first film, some two years later dentist Stu has a real soulmate (Jamie Chung) and is marrying her in Thailand. Or as socially challenged, probably-has-Asperger-syndrome Alan likes to call it, Thighland. I kept forgetting what the fiancée’s name is (Lauren) but not what Phil says about her: she’s an angel and has a “solid rack for an Asian.” The former is certainly true: she forgives everything, even that the guys put her 16-year-old brother Teddy’s (played by Ang Lee’s cute son Mason) life in danger.
As for her “solid rack,” I defer to Phil’s expertise. Such audacity is as important to The Hangover franchise as the bachelor party theme. You are supposed to walk out thinking, ‘How do they get away with this?’—while not-so secretly relishing that they do. Chatting about solid racks is commonplace in the average human wolfpack—that’s what Alan likes to call the crew—and that’s part of the franchise’s success. So is liberation from routine. Thailand, with its thriving sex industry, is even more suited than Vegas to loosening inhibitions (and boundaries: there’s a pedophilia joke). Bangkok stuns even guys who lived through a night with Mike Tyson and Mr. Chow in Vegas. “Holler,” screeches Mr. Chow (Ken Jeong, reprising the role). “City of squalor.”
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