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| Released: |
2011 |
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| Genre: |
BLACK COMEDY
SEQUEL
COMEDY
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| Origin: |
US |
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| Colour: |
C |
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| Length: |
102 |
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The Hangover Part II is the worst sequel of all time.
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Reviewed by Chris Tookey
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I realise that is quite a claim. After all, the 20th century gave us Death Wish 2, Child’s Play 3 and Return to the Blue Lagoon. The 21st has already thrown up such hideous cultural artefacts as Saw III, Daddy Day Camp and Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo.
But The Hangover Part II trounces all competition by being four diabolical movies in one. It offers an aggressively bone-headed glorification of male sexism, a toe-curlingly racist view of the non-American world, and a Gary Glitterish celebration of sex tourism. Not content with being uniquely repellent as a one-off movie, it also reflects a comprehensive misunderstanding of its predecessor’s success.
Two years ago, I gave The Hangover a five-star review. Despite that albatross around its neck, it became the surprise hit of 2009, and was acclaimed as the funniest comedy of its year by critics and audiences alike. It went on to gross almost half a billion dollars worldwide.
So it is no surprise that the sequel seeks to repeat the winning formula. But the original film entertained as buddy-buddy comedy by building up the three men’s nightmarish predicament with plenty of imagination, a far-fetched but logical plot, and a breathless pace.
If you cared to analyse it seriously, it was the comedic equivalent to Fight Club: a journey into the heart of masculine darkness, with males being portrayed as dangerous to others and themselves, if they don’t come to terms with their responsibilities to females and family.
The happy ending came when they finally grew up, which was one reason why, despite the movie’s gross-out humour, many women found it as funny and heart-warming as men did.
Tragically, the sequel shows that director Todd Phillips (who also made the original) hasn’t a clue why the first film worked. As for his woefully inept co-writers Craig Mazin (Superhero Movie) and Scot Armstrong (Semi-Pro), their one idea is to duplicate the original – often scene by scene, and sometimes even shot by shot - but extract every vestige of humour with ruthless precision, replacing it with foul language, violence and obscenity.
The film’s only noteworthy achievement is that it contains more uses of the f-word and c-word than any other 15 certificate picture in the history of cinema. I don’t know anyone who isn’t a member of the British Board of Film Classification, who would consider this a suitable movie to show 15 year-olds.
By the time convicted rapist Mike Tyson closes this sorry sleazefest and captures its ethos all too accurately by indulging in a talentless, tone-deaf rendition of One Night in Bangkok, to which the on-screen characters react as if he is the miraculous reincarnation of all four Beatles, the male protagonists show no sign at all that they have matured. In fact, the reverse is true. They learn to embrace and celebrate the side of them that is most depraved, sordid and criminally irresponsible.
Bizarrely, this is supposed to make their womenfolk and prospective father-in-law respect them more.
What world do these film-makers live in? Not this one, that’s for sure, and theirs is a thousand light years from Planet Funny.
In The Hangover II, three youngish men wake up hung over after a bachelor party, not in a luxurious Las Vegas hotel but in seedy, downtown Bangkok, to discover that Alan (Zach Galifianakis), the eternal adolescent with a history of child molesting and drug abuse, has acquired a shaven head and a chain-smoking capuchin monkey; Stu (Ed Helms, pictured), the mild-mannered dentist about to get married, sports an ugly facial tattoo like Mike Tyson’s; while ring-leader Phil (Bradley Cooper) discovers that they have mislaid all except the amputated ring-finger of the groom’s 16 year-old future brother-in-law (Mason Lee), a talented cellist and aspiring surgeon.
They also find themselves sharing their room with the Asian gangster from the first movie (Ken Jeong) who promptly snorts cocaine and suffers cardiac arrest.
The movie then dutifully repeats the formula of the first movie, with the friends not stealing a police car this time, but inexplicably kidnapping a Buddhist monk. They run foul of Russian gangsters, not Asian ones. And Stu learns that, instead of marrying a beautiful female escort, he has received unprotected anal sex from a transsexual prostitute.
Along with laughs, what is missing from these proceedings is any degree of plausibility. It doesn’t cross Stu’s mind, despite his medical training, that he may have contracted Aids and be in danger of passing it on to his future bride.
No one behaves with grief or shock that a talented cellist has lost a crucial finger. Nor, indeed, does the young man himself seem upset at having less than his full complement of digits.
They don’t feel any remorse as American tourists that they have trashed a foreign bar, caused a riot and inconvenienced the local police. And the legal authorities appear equally unconcerned that they have done so.
Because little is plausible and nothing is funny, all the actors mug horribly in disastrous attempts to compensate.
The level of humour is summed up in a scene when Alan uses a soda bottle to simulate an erection under the old Buddhist priest’s robes, and their monkey imitates a sex act on the bottle. This is greeted with uproarious laughter by Americans, Thais and even the ancient monk himself.
Alan celebrates this high-point in international relations with the line “When a monkey nibbles a penis, it’s funny in any language!”
As I looked around at the stony faces of my colleagues, I couldn’t help reflecting that Alan was being over-optimistic.
Other attempts to inspire belly-laughs include Alan shooting off an automatic weapon in a crowded bar, one of them – and the monkey – suffering gruesome gunshot wounds, and another being offered the services of a child prostitute.
Any of these “gags” would be problematic in skilled hands. Fumbled by Mr Phillips with all the dexterity of King Kong wearing boxing gloves, they die an exquisitely horrible, lingering death.
The one redeeming factor is that Stu does eventually own up to his bad behaviour and immorality, if not to the likelihood of sexual infection. In this country, he’d probably take out a super-injunction and threaten to sue anyone who told the truth.
I realise that nothing can prevent millions of people from buying tickets for The Hangover II, and don’t let me stop you. You have every right to make up your own mind. By all means act on the assumption that I am a morally judgmental snob.
But don’t blame me if you then discover for yourself that this movie stinks.
IN DEFENCE OF MOVIE CRITICISM.
Uh-oh, it’s happened again. A film universally hammered by the critics has gone on to break box-office records on its opening weekend. I called The Hangover 2 “the worst sequel of all time” and I wasn’t alone in finding it despicable.
America’s leading critics were virtually unanimous in condemnation, calling it “terrible”, “insulting” and “shockingly inept”. The New York Times hailed it as the worst kind of Hollywood landmark: “Someone has finally dared to make a mainstream American comedy in which nothing funny happens.”
Even the young, desperately trendy critics on the internet didn’t like it. One I know, who looks about twelve, called it “tasteless, pointless, tactless and pretty much anything else you care to stick the ‘-less’ suffix on.... Hangover 2 is shit, and if you like it so are you.”
That’s telling ’em. And yet the movie took $86 million on its first weekend, a new record for a comedy. It followed on from Pirates of the Caribbean 4, which survived a critical mauling to make $346 million, the fourth largest global opening ever.
So does this obvious disparity between reviews and box office performance mean that critics are out of touch with the masses and no good to man or beast?
Er, no.
Critics are not tipsters. Unless they write for trade papers, their function is not to guess whether or not the public is going to buy tickets. Critics are concerned with quality, not quantity.
The first Hangover grossed fewer than 45 million dollars on its first weekend, but that does not mean it was half as good as the sequel, which took almost double the amount.
The reason sequels are made is that studio accountants know they make money, regardless of quality. The fact that the fourth Pirates movie made five times as much money on its opening as the first reflects the ready-made audience created by the success of its predecessors – along with higher ticket prices, the amount of money spent publicising it, and the number of screens on which it opened.
If you look at the performance of the Harry Potter films, the best opening was achieved by the most recent one (125 million dollars), but that’s because it opened at 4,125 cinemas, unlike the first of the series, which began on 3,672 screens and made around 90 million.
Sequels don’t always make as much money as an original, but they are a safe bet at the box office. With poor-quality sequels, there is invariably a huge drop-off in audiences after the first week-end, but if a movie is opened “wide” enough – that means on enough screens - the sequel will have made back its costs before adverse word-of-mouth and damning reviews can take effect.
Hangover Part II really is massively inferior to the first movie, but audiences were always going to want to make up their own minds, not have critics tell them what to do. That strikes me as a healthily stroppy, anti-authoritarian reaction – and it’s nothing new.
Branding and publicity have always carried more weight on a first weekend than the reviews.
Many people were baffled by the box-office success last year of Alice in Wonderland. It wasn’t brilliant, and the 3D effects were disappointing.
The reason the film proved to be critic-proof was that it was part of a highly recognisable brand, based on the collaboration of star Johnny Depp and director Tim Burton. It was able, therefore, to cash in on the audience goodwill generated by their previous films together, which included Edward Scissorhands, Charlie and The Chocolate Factory and Sweeney Todd. That, along with a child-friendly title, enabled Alice to gross over 334 million dollars.
My job in reviewing it, however, was not to analyse its box office potential; it was to say what I thought of its quality, and – because I write for millions of readers – try to indicate who in its potential audience might like it more than I did.
So why have critics? There’s a common misapprehension, encouraged by the growth of the internet, that everyone’s opinion is of equal value. Informed or insightful criticism, the kind that is capable of constructing an argument and probing the ideas or values behind a film, is routinely denounced – especially, in my experience, by those who can’t spell or punctuate - as “snobbish”, “out of touch” or (dread word) “judgmental”.
Well, it’s true that tastes differ - and inevitably so. No two people see the same movie. Every one of us filters each film we watch through our own tastes, backgrounds and moods. No one can take away our right to our own opinion, however unpopular or out of step with critical fashion.
When I write a review, I’m not telling you what to think; I’m merely expressing my opinion, which you are perfectly at liberty either to value or disregard.
But there is such a thing as bad criticism – criticism which involves lying to the public, or being ill-informed, or being insensitive to the film-maker’s aims (which doesn’t mean, of course, that one has to agree with the film-maker’s intentions).
A good critic may also have to seem harsh in order to be honest.
There is a common misconception that “to criticise” is the opposite of “to love”. If you are the kind of critic who dislikes a lot of films, you can easily gain a reputation as a curmudgeon who hates movies. In reality, the opposite is true.
A restaurant reviewer who liked all food, however badly cooked or unpalatable, would not be much of a critic. A film critic who writes rave reviews of junk should not be trusted either.
Critics are often accused of being “middle-aged and middle-class,” and most of them are. If you aren’t middle-aged and middle-class when you begin your writing career, you almost certainly will be by the time you are in your prime.
And being a good critic does involve having some degree of historical perspective, which means that long experience is an asset, and youth a disadvantage - though the ability to recognise whether a film has appeal to the young can be an asset.
Honest, probing criticism is now under threat as never before. In most newspapers and magazines, there has been a move away from in-depth reviews and towards showbiz journalism and uncritical interviews, with reviews reduced to one-paragraph summaries of audience appeal – the more upbeat and celebrational, the better.
That reflects a dumbing down in pursuit of sales, the rise of the celebrity culture (which has even led to celebrities being employed by some red-top tabloids instead of genuine critics), and the growth of multinational media groups.
It’s regrettable. The most famous American movie critic, Roger Ebert, wrote recently “a newspaper film critic is like a canary in a coal mine. When one croaks, get the hell out. The lengthening toll of former film critics acts as a poster child for the self-destruction of American newspapers.”
Thanks to the internet, there are more film critics than ever before, but good ones are an endangered species. This has become all the more true, as more and more newspapers and magazines are taken over by conglomerates which include film-making interests. Too many editors fear offending advertisers and interest groups. Almost all are to some extent dependent on advertising by the film industry.
In this context, the employment of honest, incorruptible, fearless critics – whether you agree with them or not - is a vital sign of healthy journalism.
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, Ed Helms 