Sequel City — The Hangover Part II and Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides
Published by Pop Bunker, May 30, 2011
Hello everyone, and welcome to a Summer 2011 edition of Sequel City. Graduate school has been leaning on me heavily during this prime sequel season, but I managed to see these two movies within 24 hours of each other. I figured I would cover both with a quick little mash-up.
Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides was already reviewed by Icy Sedgwick <LINK> here. I completely concur with the review (and loved the comments afterwards, by the way—it’s fun when Dale Cooper hates something!)
I don’t have much to add to Icy’s review apart from my own opinion, most of which springs from the fact that I LOATHED the second and third movies of this series. The first one was cool, but the hate started bubbling up in me during the second any time there was too much going on, too many characters floating around, and Keira Knightley and Orlando Bloom being featured again. I’m sure they are awesome people in real life, but Knightley and Bloom seriously grated on me as that bloated second movie, Dead’s Man Chest, wore on.
I only saw the third movie under duress—my mom wanted me to see it with her, and she used the whole “childbirth” card to guilt me into it. At World’s End really sucked. How can you have a corny Disney live-action movie that lasts three freaking hours?! Why would a swashbuckling supernatural pirate movie need to have so many plots running at once? And sure, the effects looked cool, but they tend to lose their effectiveness when you hate yourself and everyone in the theater for having to sit through YET ANOTHER DOUBLE CROSS that somehow the idiot characters didn’t see coming!
Anyway, cut to now: Mom had no one to go with again and somehow retained her love for this franchise, so off we went. (I am nothing if not a good son.) And…I didn’t hate this one.
As Icy reported, it is The Jack Sparrow Show this time, and I was cool with it. Penelope Cruz is a nice addition as Jack’s love interest/chief rival, and Geoffrey Rush is back, looking more like a pirate than ever. This sequel was what 2 and 3 should have been, in my opinion: continue on with SOME of the characters, leave the others behind, and have a standalone plot. Have some sword fighting, some cool shots of the ships at sea, and a lot of Johnny Depp mincing around and being witty.
My review: it was ok. A shrug. If you dig the series as a whole, like my mother, you’ll be happy with this new one. And if, like me, you liked the original but not the follow-ups, maybe you’ll find Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides more to your liking.
Ok, on to The Hangover Part II.
The original was a great movie in my opinion. It’s a shame that we don’t really think of comedies as being “great” movies, and it’s an even bigger shame that there are so few comedies produced that are eligible in the first place. The Hangover was a GREAT comedy, funny and raunchy and dirty and unapologetically adult, a farce that for and about people who are old enough to drink too much and have ill-advised sex and screw up their lives. It was uncute and uncorny and without “heart”—apart from the obligatory happy ending, of course, which had to be forgiven because the rest was so relentlessly funny.
The sequel falls short of that greatness, to the surprise of no one, I would suppose. Sequel City was begun on the precept that movies with numbers in their names do not HAVE to suck, that some, in fact, don’t, and that it is not impossible for a sequel to be better than its original.
I still believe that last part…except maybe for comedies. I don’t know if it’s possible for a comedy sequel to have the same characters and the same formula and be as good as the original, to get the same laughs as the original, even assuming the same sensibilities and the same quality of filmmaking and acting. Maybe it just can’t be done.
The Hangover Part II is still good. It surprised me how close it stayed to the original’s structure, and you definitely go longer between laughs this time. However, the laughs are still present, and the formula is still serviceable. It’s just as raunchy and nasty as the original, more so, perhaps, and it’s still a great blast of defiance to the corny Adam Sandler and Jennifer Aniston-fests that pass as comedies each year. And Zach Galifianakis is back with his incredible character Allen, and so is poor Ed Helms, and crazy Ken Jeong, and there’s another wedding that might not happen because of a nasty case of debauchery followed by convenient group amnesia.
I won’t spoil more for you. I will bid you adieu and return back in June, this time with a Master’s degree under my belt.