Movie reviews
He’s not lying. The Hangover Part II (16s) is a rethread of 2009’s smash hit… and it’s not as good as the first outing. It doesn’t even come close. The Wolfpack are in Thailand for Stu’s (Ed Helms) wedding but he’s insists there will be no bachelor party after what happened in Vegas. After a cosy beer around a beach campfire, Phil, Stu and Alan (Zach Galifianiakis) wake up in a sleazy Bangkok hotel room with a monkey, a severed finger belonging to 16-year-old Teddy (Mason Lee), Stu’s future brother-in-law, who is nowhere to be seen, and Mr Chow (Ken Jeong), The Hangover’s bad guy. Before he can tell them what went down, Chow keels over and dies and the guys band together to find the missing Teddy before his father, who already has it in for Stu, goes ballistic. It’s the same set up that worked a treat last time but in his effort to up the ante, director Todd Phillips (Old School, Due Date) forgot the gags. The antics feel forced as the expected troop through the back streets of Bangkok brings our heroes up against a host of oddities. It’s all rather predictable and tired now and in their race to make the plot as bizarre as they can The Hangover Part II loses the charm the original boasted.
PRE-TEEN middle-schooler Greg Heffley (Zachary Gordon) is a legend in his own mind, but reality has a rude way of intruding on his fantasies. In Diary of a Wimpy Kid 2: Rodrick Rules (G), Greg is forced to spend more time with his bullying high school brother Rodrick (Devon Bostick), when their mother decides it’s time the siblings bonded. What follows is essentially a pre-teen comedy of embarrassment, as aspiring rock star Rodrick humiliates Greg at every turn. All of which is bad enough, but Greg has lost his heart to new girl Holly (Peyton List), which gives Rodrick’s tormenting another agonising twist. It’s all good, clean family fun, but where Wimpy Kid 2 differs from its predecessor is in placing Devon Bostick front and centre, where his Ashton Kutcher-lite schtick entirely overshadows the rather charmless Gordon, whose acting is so wooden that the decision by director David Bowers to depict Greg’s cartoon alter-ego as a puppet seems unnecessarily cruel. With Steve Zahn sidelined as the brothers’ hapless father, and Robert Capron a lumpen presence as Greg’s best friend Rowley, it’s left to Bostick to invest the movie with what little fizz it possesses.
