Review: The Hangover 2

I think your expectation of this film and it's predecessor depends entirely on what you expect of it. When The Hangover came out, the reason (I think) that people loved it so much is because everybody expected it to be crap. To be fair, the advert didn't exactly sell it; it looked like the standard, mass-produced Hollywood screwball man-comedy with copious penis-gags, some not-very-funny slapstick and blush-inducing rudeness. And it DID have all those things, but - somehow - it was actually funny. Admittedly, by the time I got round to watching it (I resisted it for months), people had given it so much hype that I was expecting a Full Monty-level of hilarity. I was disppointed. I mean, it WAS funny, it just wasn't as funny as I'd been led to expect it would be. If I'd seen it before all the hype I think I would have loved it, but as it was, I found it pretty funny, but basically just another boys-comedy.

The Hangover 2, on the other hand, I was expecting to be god-awful. Sequels are almost always a lesser version of the original, and comedy sequels are almost always utterly shite. However, I was quite pleasantly surprised. Actually no, 'pleasant' is not - whatever your opinion - a word that can be applied to this film. But I was surprised; my heart sank with the lights as I was sat in the cinema, but it didn't take long for the laughs to start, and they kept coming. It wasn't absolutely hysterical, and it was unnecessarily rude to the point I had to avert my eyes with horror several times, but it was funny.

The plot was exactly the same as the first film - they'd substituted a monkey for the baby, a Thai lady-boy for a Vegas hooker and a tattoo for a missing tooth, but the essential storyline was more or less identical. That said, why change what's apparently a winning formula? So I don't think it was actually any better or worse than the first one, but because I was expecting much less of it, I enjoyed it much more.

Basic summary: a very rude, funny and slightly predictable repetition of The Hangover, of which your enjoyment will be directly proportional to how bad you expect it to be.

Rating: * * * (good)