Review: The Hangover Part II

The wolfpack takes a trip they’ve by and large taken before.

Probably since the moment of its official announcement, the hype and anticipation surrounding The Hangover Part II speculated that the sequel to the 2009 monster hit comedy couldn’t avoid a presumed – and expected – sophomore stumble. Much of that first film’s success, really, grew out of its out-of-left-field surprise : with its pairing of journeyman comics Ed Helms and Zack Galifianakis with then-unproven leading man Bradley Cooper, and a concept that seemed to owe more to Las Vegas tourism commercials than organic inspiration, the film’s raunchy escapism and bromantic camaraderie was, if not exactly fresh, a modern take on the “boys will be boys” comedic trope. Enjoying a playing field more or less left to itself in the no-fun zone of the summer 2009 movie season, the original grossed close to half a billion dollars worldwide.

Jump ahead two years to this sequel, whose guiding maxim seems to run something along the lines of “nothing succeeds like success.” But can it succeed? Well no, maybe of course not, but then it doesn’t often try very hard. The budget is more than doubled, the jokes are raunchier and there are more genitalia on display, but audiences will likely find a depressing amount of sameness anyway. If you liked the first, you’ll like this one, but not as much and perhaps even in spite of yourself.

Changing the environs from Vegas to the more picturesque – but perhaps no less heady – setting of Bangkok, this second adventure has the gang decamping for Thailand to celebrate the marriage of “wolfpack” member Stu (Ed Helms) to a woman of Thai descent (Jamie Chung.) Buddies Phil (Cooper) and Doug (Justin Bartha) are onboard as groomsmen, and the gang reluctantly invites Doug’s brother-in-law Alan (Galifianakis), as before, at the urging of Doug’s wife (Sasha Barrese.) The marriage is far from ideal almost at once. The bride’s father (Nirit Sirijanya) disapproves of Stu, comparing him to rice porridge, and Alan takes an immediate, competitive dislike to her brother Teddy (Mason Lee.)

Stu’s plans for a low-key, beachside campfire bachelor party take a turn for the disastrous – the movie has to happen somehow – and the gang wakes up the next morning in a Bangkok hotel room with, naturally, no memory of the previous night. Teddy is missing, though one of his fingers is recovered from a glass of water, and bumbling criminal Chow (Ken Jeong) is naked and unconscious on the hotel room floor.

Panicked but determined to find Teddy, the group reenters the sun-drenched, sun-bleached Bangkok streets hoping to find him before the wedding ceremony that evening. Their search gets them entangled with a corrupt businessman (Paul Giamatti, completely wasted here), a hermaphrodite strip bar/brothel, and Russian gangsters who want the obnoxious, cigarette-smoking monkey the wolfpack found in their room.

Even before the search really begins, anyone paying attention can spot the crippling loyalty to the original’s bag of tricks: the seamy morning-after locales, the replacement of Teddy for Doug as missing person, the use of Chow as manic comic foil; Teddy’s final rescue comes not as a result of the group’s diligence but as a brainstorm that reveals his hiding place all along. That’s fine by itself, but the innovation this time around seems largely based on amping the shock value of the first: as the original had frontal nudity, this one displays transsexual body parts. Stu has sex with a man instead of a woman. People are shot instead of beaten up.

In time the devotion becoming slavish, then almost compulsive, except the jokes fall flat – nothing’s as funny the second time – and there aren’t enough of them to make the repetition besides the point, as in similarly comedy sequels like Airplane II and all the iterations of National Lampoon’s Vacation. Director Todd Philips, working with two screenwriters who didn’t participate in the first, keep the jokes at the same pitch as the predecessor. But without the element of surprise – with the expectation of getting shocked – the shock value deflates, like a punch you know is coming and then doesn’t sting as much as a result.

The performances are similarly uniform, and not in a way that’s always endearing. Cooper can coast by on looks and charm – that’s all the role asks of him, really – but Helms, Galifianakis, and Jeong have a harder time keeping their respective schticks fresh. We’ve groused before that Galifianakis was already on his way to becoming what Steve Zahn was in the 90s: a talented, oddball comic actor whose welcome was squandered on inferior projects. But his weirdo routine is starting to show its age already, particularly in the malice Alan shows for Teddy and his childlike devotion to the monkey. Helms and Jeong, meanwhile, go through R-rated motions of the characters they play on NBC Thursday nights.

There’s an old piece of conventional wisdom that sequels will typically reap sixty percent of the box office as their hit predecessors. Why shouldn’t the same formula apply to audience satisfaction? The Hangover Part II is sixty percent as entertaining as the first, the rest lost to limp shock value and diminished inspiration. If you can settle for that, you won’t have a bad time.

- Michael Kabel

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DVD Review: The Goods: Live Hard, Sell Hard

Raunchy, overlooked used car comedy arrives on DVD tomorrow.

Dumped into theatres late last summer and doomed to a quick box office death, The Goods: Live hard, Sell Hard deserves a better fate on home video. Though calling it a classic or even expert filmmaking would overstate the case a bit,  first-time director Neal Brennan and a huge, overqualified cast  manage build a loose, rambling movie that expects nothing of you but your own low expectations. Because of that, and sometimes despite it, the film is often riotously funny.

Like Talladega Nights and seemingly dozens of other Will Ferrell movies (Ferrell and frequent collaborator Adam McKay co-produced), The Goods puts an alpha dog personality in a working-class situation for trashy comic effect, relying on a barrage of potty language, sexual innuendo and slapstick violence to crowd-surf the audience from one gag to the next. Thrown in for good measure: weird, sometimes lovable supporting characters; an improbably warm-hearted romantic interest; and a shaggy plot hinging on personal honor. In fact, the film doggedly follows that blueprint, moving its characters from one gag or situation to the next while barely slowing down to establish context or meaning to the jokes. You laugh a lot while it’s happening, even as you’re aware everyone could manage to do better.

The saving grace is that most of the jokes are funny – sometimes very funny, with at least three extended gags that detonate with explosive comic payoff. “Used car mercenary” Don Ready (Jeremy Piven) and his team of high-pressure sales experts are hired by failing Temecula, California car patriarch Ben Selleck (James Brolin) to get rid of 200 cars over the Fourth of July weekend. Because the process of inventory liquidation only has so much comic potential, the script comes fully loaded with character baggage: Ready is haunted by a previous failure that ended in the death of his best friend. His teammates are bizarrely distracted by various sex-charged problems: oversexed Babs (Kathryn Hahn) lusts after Selleck’s man-child son (Rob Riggle); sensitive Jibby (Ving Rhames) longs to “make love” to a woman (as opposed to just having sex); financial wizard Brent (David Koechner) finds himself the reluctant object of Selleck’s homosexual advances.

Ready woos Selleck’s daughter Ivy (Jordana Spiro), despite her engagement to weaselly import car salesman/boy-band vocalist Paxton (Ed Helms). The film knows – and we know it knows – that the two are going to end up together, and their courtship has a going-through-the-motions quality despite Spiro’s luminous charm. Ready also finds a possible long-lost son in Selleck’s youngest employee Blake (Jonathan Sadowski), a junior salesman with all of his signature moves. While the potential in that setup teems with character and gag possibilities, the film never really gets the story thread moving. As with the other plotlines, it’s one more thing in the circus of the film’s action.

But despite all the characters and the bevy of jokes the film still sometimes manages to lose its momentum, especially during a plot twist late in the second act that feels forced to the point of snapping. Amplifying this problem is another issue, one of comic pitch: rather than lose additional time by going for depth, Brennan chooses instead to make the movie louder, ever louder. When Ready has his most sincere moment, it’s at the top of his lungs; characters incessantly shout at one another. Such zeal works in skit comedy, but repetitive scenes in a 90 minute film drag on the audience’s patience, raising the bar for the next gag to regain the comic momentum.

Piven charges Ready’s character with sleazy confidence, probably the only way to play such a outsized-by-design personality. Yet he sometimes stumbles giving Ready vulnerability or warmth. Hahn, Rhames and Koechner all make the most of their parts, each of which only comes down to a single character point anyway: the horny one, the sweet one, the smart one. Charles Napier, Tony Hale, and Ken Jeong (Community) are all endearing as Selleck’s beleaguered employees, while Craig T. Robinson makes a perfect ringer playing a defiant disc jockey in charge of music for the three-day sellathon. By contrast, Helms plays the smug Paxton as a variation of Andy Bernard, his character on The Office, while Riggle xeroxes Steve Carrell’s turn in Anchorman to play the childish Steve Selleck. Those Daily Show alumni do know how to play it safe.

Which is not to say this film called for anything too inventive, anyway. Its low ambitions are served well enough, and it’s entertaining while you watch it, containing at least a half-dozen quotes you’ll want to share with friends. In our review of the thearical release we had predicted an unrated-version coming to home video quickly. That’s not the case, though why the studio chose not to exploit Helms’ success with The Hangover in promoting this release is anyone’s guess. The Goods deserves better, if not much, than the reception it got from the public. Next stop for, we fear: endless, bowdlerized reruns on Comedy Central, basic cable’s version of a used car lot.

- Michael Kabel
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Preview: The Goods: Live Hard, Sell Hard

August comedy features Jeremy Piven in possibly the role he was born to play.

With the end of the summer movie season just around the corner, we admit to feeling a little mean-spirited. Star Trek was just okay, Wolverine, Transformers and Public Enemies were disappointing, and Terminator: Salvation aggressively sucked. But with August comes the studio’s middle children, the films in which they place little hope or confidence in turning a profit. And what better film for such a siesta than one about used cars, starring an actor with one of the most love-him-or-hate-him reputations in the business?

Jeremy Piven (Entourage) stars in The Goods: Live Hard, Sell Hard, the debut directing effort from Neal Brennan, formerly one of the main creative forces behind the much-missed Chappelle’s Show. Piven leads a cast full of comedy ringers on a mission to liquidate two hundred used cars over a single Fourth of July weekend. Really, though, the plot’s race-against-time conceit is just a timetable for the slapstick violence and raunchy jokes that will make or break the film. If there’s more funny jokes than just appear in the trailer below, hitting that goal shouldn’t be a problem.

Despite its warts-and-all cinematic potential, the retail car industry only gets big screen attention every decade or so. Robert Zemeckis’ (Back to the Future) 1980 effort Used Cars put Kurt Russell and Jack Warden in a typical save-the-family-business setup. 1990′s black comedy Cadillac Man starred Robin Williams as a fast-talking Queens car dealer in career meltdown. Both films seem to sort of influence The Goods, with their loose structure, sleazeball protagonists, and sense of make-or-break plot stakes. (1999′s weird, misbegotten adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions starred Bruce Willis and Nick Nolte as Pontiac salesmen coming unglued. It’s not really relevant here.)

This picture here, for example.

Piven, whose picture could serve as the graphic for Wikipedia’s definition of “acquired taste,” is ideally cast as someone who’s fun to hate. Joining him in his team of liquidators are Ving Rhames (Pulp Fiction), the ubitquitous David Koechner (Thank Your For Smoking) and Kathryn Hahn (Step Brothers). Also appearing are Tony Hale (Arrested Development), Ken Jeong (Pineapple Express), Ed Helms (The Hangover), Jordana Spiro (My Boys) and Craig Robinson (The Office). James Brolin also shows up, presumably to give the proceedings a little class.

Despite the cast (who all have their share of clunkers in their resumes) we’d be less enthused about the film if not for Brennan. If one of Judd Apatow’s proteges had helmed the film, or if it came from Trey Parker and Matt Stone, or Broken Lizard, we wouldn’t care less. (And thank God it doesn’t star Will Ferrell or Jack Black.) But Chappelle’s Show was as much as about meaning and subtext as it was about laugh value – America quickly forgot the smart memoir lurking behind “I’m Rick James, bitch” – and with its so-timely subject matter The Goods could be something more than cheap laughs delivered in spitballing fashion: it could become the comedy that years from now serves as cultural touchstone.

Or it could be another late-summer lemon. But after three months of movie hype collapsing into disappointment, there’s little to lose at this point by giving it a shot. Now, how much would you pay?

The Goods: Live Hard, Sell Hard opens nationwide August 14.

- Michael Kabel

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