I wasn’t that big a fan of the first Hangover. Sure, it had its laugh out loud moments, a few good OMFG shocks here and there, a sincerely nice stripper just looking for the right guy, and it launched Zach Galifianakis’ career. But despite all of this, the surreality of actually believing that three men can undergo an night that includes stealing a tiger from Mike Tyson’s home and sneaking the animal into the penthouse suite of the Caesar’s palace while being so effed up that they can’t remember a thing the next day was a too big a suspension of disbelief for me. I laughed, but I could not shake up the feeling that it could have had much more to offer. The Hangover Part II tries really hard to recreate the spontaneity, absurdity, and laughs of the first; it manages it at times, but on most tries it misses by a long shot. The result is a lesser carbon copy of the first that is missing the one thing that did make the first Hangover memorable, freshness.
