Don't Go
So we went to see Hangover 2 last night.If you saw the first movie, and enjoyed it, and just want to see the first movie remade in a new location, then you will be bitterly disappointed.
The Hangover was a ridiculous, lighthearted movie. The sequel is anything but lighthearted--at times, it's downright menacing, and it's incredibly dark. The script is downright bizarre--it's like someone wrote an action suspense movie, then somebody else bought the script, grafted some funny bits into the script every five minutes, and called it a comedy. And some of the funny stuff is very funny, but there's just so little of it.
Gloria had an interesting observation, and I don't think this is a spoiler. The first movie was very much a slippery slope kind of film, where things just kept getting worse and worse on the way down. The sequel is the opposite--it's a climb the mountain film, where you start at the bottom. It's a quest film, really.
I think it's true of comedies that slippery slopes film are generally funnier than quest films, because slippery slopes tend to produce a progressive increase in outrageousness. That's very much a comic trope. Quest films? Not so much.
Ironically, for about the first 2/3 of the film, while it's incredibly dark and only occasionally funny, it's quite interesting--not in the way I wanted, necessarily, but as a suspense thriller with intermittent comedy injections, it's entertaining. In the last 1/3, though, the script (which was already shaky at times) utterly collapses.
Really, if you want to enjoy how funny the Hangover was, just rent the original and watch it again. That would still be funnier and more enjoyable than seeing the sequel.
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