The Hangover II

I saw the second Hangover movie last night. I didn’t love the first one, but it definitely had its charms (Zach Galifianakis). The second one was, as anticipated, a very lazy re-hashing of the entire plot of the first one. It was also weirdly boring. But whatever, I was having a pleasant enough time.

Then, just like in the first one, somebody finds a cell phone at the very end of the film and is like “look here’s a bunch of pictures from our crazy night,” and then they run a slideshow of the pictures next to the end credits. And whatever, some of the pictures were funny, etc. They were sort of doing pictures that riffed on films set in the Vietnam War (russian roulette jokes / deerhunter, etc.), which, the movie is set in Thailand, but, fine, you get a bunch of dudes together with cocaine and strippers, they’re gonna eventually start making Deerhunter jokes.

Then the final photo is this:

Which is of course an imitation of this:

Which is a photograph of the face of a man actually about to die, who did die.

So, there’s that.

I honestly can’t even reconstruct what anyone involved could possibly have been thinking. Is it supposed to be funny? I can’t tell! I actually don’t know what they thought this photo was doing in there.

I’ve been reading blog entries about this issue. Apparently Roger Ebert talked about how offensive it is, so then everybody had to be like “what’s offensive? what photo? What’s the Vietnam War?” (I found one post online that asked “is that Vietnam photo REALLY all that famous?” which, LOL) and once they figured it out they all weighed in on their cool movie review blogs, and most of them took the stance that anything offensive is automatically great comedy, thus should never be censored. I feel this stance misses about eight of the possible ten points that could actually be made in a conversation about this photo (also reveals a pretty disheartening understanding of “comedy,” lets be honest). Another post said that yes, it’s offensive, but so many people are paying to see the movie that that is its own justification. Another post said that because the man in the photo was a Vietcong assassin, and the man doing the shooting was Vietnamese and not American, then it’s not offensive. Um? I feel completely exhausted even beginning to engage with it so I will just bail. I will say however that I am tired of the word “offensive.” It never actually puts its finger on anything actually going on in a given circumstance. “Offensive.” What does that even mean? I’m not “offended” by this photo. “Offended” is, like, what you feel when you smell dogshit. It lacks any kind of intellectual engagement, as a descriptive term. I am sick of people using it. It always implies a binary–if it’s “offensive” it should be “censored,” OR NOT, because of the FIRST AMENDMENT. When you put it like that it is always a stupid argument that I’m not interested in. I’m not interested in whether or not we the audience should be “allowed” to look at this photo. Anyway, whatever, it’s hardly even worth talking about.

I think this is what it actually feels like to get old, though.

Anyway, the Hangover II: strangely slack and boring, with a couple funny Galifianakis lines that were surely improvised, some disturbing monkey imagery, more gross-out jokes, more Mike Tyson exploitation, another wedding that must be gotten to, some transphobia, and one truly great joke delivered by Ken Jeong.

Hangover III is apparently already in the works. How, oh how, will these three crazy guys manage to accidentally take roofies again? I’m sure they will find a way.