By Scott Martin

The Hangover Part II, USA, 2011

Directed by Todd Phillips

You take the good, you take the bad, you take them both and there you have The Hangover Part II, a movie that takes everything clever and amusing about its first part and turns it into something of a retread. We’ve seen it all before, and we certainly know the story: a few friends get way too drunk, wake up with no memory of anything that happened, and have to go on a fact-finding mission to recover the pieces of the night before. The film falls into the trap of its formula and can’t seem to get out. It worked in the first one because there’s no reason that any of that stuff should have happened – it wasn’t in the nature of those characters – but now it is in their nature, we’re taught to expect it, and there’s no reason it should have happened. Again. Maybe that’s funny to some people, but it belies the originality of the characters, characters I grew to love in the first film. Read More