The Hangover Part II

Stu has rebuilt his life since Las Vegas.

He's left Melissa behind and is preparing to marry Lauren in Thailand.

Most importantly, he's determined not to repeat Doug's bachelor-party catastrophe.

There will be no wild night.

No Vegas.

No drugs.

No Alan-controlled celebrations.

Stu's idea of a bachelor party is brunch.

Phil understandably finds this depressing.

But when the group arrives in Thailand for the wedding, even Stu eventually agrees to one harmless beer on the beach.

Considering their history, this is an extraordinarily bad decision.

Alan is delighted to reunite with Phil, Stu and Doug.

He's considerably less enthusiastic about Teddy.

Lauren's younger brother is intelligent, talented, polite and immediately welcomed by everyone around him.

Alan sees competition.

His strange jealousy towards Teddy becomes important when the group gathers around a beach fire before the wedding.

The next thing anybody remembers is waking up somewhere very different.

And Teddy isn't there.

Phil wakes first.

They're no longer at the resort.

They're in Bangkok.

Stu has a tattoo across his face.

Alan's head has been shaved.

Doug is safely back at the resort — making him perhaps the smartest member of the Wolfpack this time.

Teddy, however, is missing.

The only sign of him is considerably more alarming.

They find one of his fingers.

Once again, Phil, Stu and Alan have no idea what happened.

Once again, they need to reconstruct the previous night before a wedding.

And once again, Mr Chow is involved.

Of all the people the Wolfpack could have encountered again, Leslie Chow is perhaps the least reassuring.

Yet there he is.

Chow reveals that he spent the previous night partying with them and begins filling in some of the blanks.

For about five minutes, it seems they finally have someone who knows what happened.

Then Chow collapses.

The Wolfpack's most useful witness suddenly isn't very useful.

Phil, Stu and Alan are left with another trail of clues through Bangkok.

Then there's the monkey.

A small capuchin wearing a denim jacket has somehow become part of the group.

Nobody knows exactly why.

Nobody knows where it came from.

Alan, naturally, loves it immediately.

The monkey smokes cigarettes, carries things for the group, and seems far more comfortable navigating Bangkok's criminal underworld than any of the humans accompanying it.

Eventually they discover why.

The little bastard is a drug-running courier.

Which means Alan has somehow replaced the baby from Vegas with a criminal monkey.

Progress.

Sort of.

The Wolfpack begins retracing its movements.

Every stop reveals another piece of the previous night's disaster.

They discover a destroyed bar.

Stu learns considerably more about his evening than he ever wanted to know.

A tattoo parlour explains the Mike Tyson-style artwork now permanently decorating his face.

And the search for Teddy takes them deeper into Bangkok.

Just like Vegas, the city becomes a giant mystery board.

Except this time the clues are nastier, the consequences are bigger, and Stu is rapidly approaching complete psychological collapse.

The monkey isn't just Alan's newest best friend.

It's carrying something important.

That makes retrieving it essential.

What follows turns the Wolfpack's search into a chaotic chase through Bangkok, culminating in their tiny accomplice getting caught in far more danger than Alan expected.

For Alan, this is devastating.

He has become genuinely attached to the animal.

Only Alan Garner could travel to Thailand for somebody else's wedding, wake up with no memory and somehow end up emotionally invested in a cigarette-smoking drug mule monkey.

And then lose the bloody monkey.

Underneath all the insanity, the same fundamental problem remains.

Teddy is missing.

And unlike Doug's disappearance in Vegas, the clues suggest something genuinely terrible might have happened to him.

Stu knows what Teddy means to Lauren and her family.

Returning to the resort without him isn't an option.

Eventually, the pieces begin fitting together.

And once again, the answer isn't quite what the Wolfpack expected.

After spending the night tearing through Bangkok, the group finally realises what happened.

Teddy never disappeared into the city as they assumed.

After losing his finger during the chaos, he ended up trapped in an elevator.

It's another wonderfully mundane solution to an enormous mystery.

The Wolfpack has survived criminals, car chases, drugs and a monkey, while Teddy has essentially been stuck waiting to be found.

Now they just need to get him back to the wedding.

The disaster gives Stu what he's struggled to find throughout the film.

Confidence.

Lauren's father has never believed Stu is good enough for his daughter.

Stu spends much of the wedding trip desperately trying to earn his approval.

But after surviving another impossible night, he finally stops trying to be the perfectly respectable son-in-law.

He stands up for himself.

The nervous dentist who once allowed Melissa to control his life is disappearing.

Bangkok may have nearly destroyed him.

But it also forces Stu to recognise who he actually is.

Just when the wedding finally appears safe, another familiar face arrives.

Mike Tyson.

His appearance connects the sequel back to the absurdity of Vegas and gives the celebration one final unexpected flourish.

The Wolfpack has survived.

Stu is married.

Teddy is safe.

Alan has made and lost a monkey friend.

Surely there can't be anything else.

Then somebody discovers a phone.

Vegas had the camera.

Bangkok has photographic evidence too.

Once again, the Wolfpack discovers that their missing night wasn't truly lost.

It was documented.

And once again, the closing images reveal just how much madness occurred while they were incapable of remembering any of it.

Stu, Phil and Alan have now survived two catastrophically bad nights together.

At this point, there's really only one sensible rule left.

Never travel anywhere with Alan.

The Hangover Part II deliberately mirrors the mystery structure of the first movie.

A celebration.

A missing person.

A blackout.

A city full of clues.

And three increasingly desperate men attempting to reconstruct what happened.

But shifting the action from Las Vegas to Bangkok gives the sequel a grimier and more chaotic atmosphere.

The characters themselves even recognise how frighteningly familiar the situation has become.

They've done this before.

They just haven't learned how to stop doing it.

The first Hangover turned a bachelor party into a mystery.

The sequel asks how much worse the same basic disaster could become somewhere completely unfamiliar.

The answer is considerably worse.

Bangkok gives the Wolfpack another collection of stories they would probably prefer nobody knew about and pushes Stu further than Vegas ever did.

But the heart of the series remains the friendship between Phil, Stu and Alan.

They're dysfunctional.

They're frequently furious with one another.

Alan is a genuine danger to everyone around him.

Yet when one of them disappears, the others don't leave anyone behind.

Not Teddy.

Not Doug.

And, if Alan has anything to say about it, apparently not the monkey either.