The Hangover Part II Movie Review

by Rick Grant
The “Wolfpack” is back for another round of booze-fueled bad craziness. This time Stu, (Ed Helms) Phil, (Bradley Cooper) and Alan, (Zach Galifianakis) agree to attend Stu’s wedding in Bangkok, Thailand.
Right away, fans of the first Hangover will know that sending this crew to Bangkok, with its wide-open sex trade and other temptations was recipe for disaster, but it would glean much laughter.
Stu is paranoid that if he has a bachelor party, it will degenerate into another fiasco like the bacchanal in Vegas. Well, Stu’s fiancee greenlights a little beer fueled male bonding party on the beach with a campfire so the guys could catch up.
Cut to the next morning, Stu, Alan, and Phil wake up in a dingy Bangkok hotel room with a monkey and no memory of what happened the night before. So like before, they have to figure out what happened during their alcohol driven madness.. Of course, they have a million questions, starting with, “How did they end up with a cigarette smoking monkey?”
What’s worse, Stu has a tattoo and Alan has a shaved head. So the trio of screwups backtracks to find out how many felonies they committed the night before. When they find out, it’s worse than they thought.
Deftly directed by Todd Phillips, the comedy is built around the day-after device of the guys discovering each outrageous event that they caused, like accidently burning down a nightclub, finding out the monkey belongs to a drug dealer who now wants to kill them, and other shocking incidents of drunken behavior.
After the first Hangover movie went ballistic, this time, Zach Galifianakis emerged as the stand out of the trio. This time, Ed Helms has a more prominent part and is the foil for the other two bumbling booze hounds who can’t let go of their frat-boy partying period now that they are responsible adults.
Although the sequel is essentially the same premise as number I, only set in a different country with these guys, who are prone to overindulging and going crazy, it’s damned funny. I laughed throughout the entire picture. So, it accomplished its objective of being outrageously guffaw producing.