The other day I mentioned what I call Hollywood Sequel-itis. The symptoms are alive and well here. It’s no surprise they made a sequel. The original film was enormously popular. With the sequel, they decide to do a lot of the same stuff. God forbid they take a chance with the characters they created in the successful first film. So instead of a baby dressed up and buddied up with Zach Galifianakis, it’s a monkey. Instead of Vegas, Thailand. Still have strippers, still have physical damage to Ed Helms’ face, still have Ken Jeong naked and jumping, still have a long blackout night of partying slowly pieced back together before a wedding. A reason studios go all Sequel-itis is that they think the audience is going to say, “Oh my god, I know what’s going to happen”, and then it does, and they laugh, saying “They did it again!”. That might be satisfying for a half-second, but really, if you want to see that funny moment when Ken Jeong jumps out at Bradley Cooper, watch the original again. That we know he’s about to do it again, and then he does, isn’t so much familiar ROFL as just boringly predictable.
Sequel-itis is bad enough, but this film also suffers from what the original and every other film of the Dude, Where’s My Car variety suffer from: passive action. Of a sort, I’ll say, because obviously there’s fighting and car chases and gun play and the like. But the basis of the story has some huge, active event happen (a bachelor party), but that event is skipped over. We join it afterwards, and the “fun” of the film is watching the characters either remember or have revealed to them what exactly happened. You’re almost subconsciously aware that someone does know what happened: the writer(s), and so you have to just wait for them to let the characters in on it. Of course, the writer always knows what’s going to happen, even in some big murder mystery thriller, but those procedurals by nature proceed forward. The characters are uncovering stuff they didn’t know, stuff that yes, ultimately the writer knows and is letting be revealed, but it’s toward an active end. A search for something that is still happening, that could happen again. It’s not the same as here. There’s little personal investment by the characters other than shock and/or regret at what they’ve already done. And once they reach a dead end, it’s up to the writer (not the characters, as if they were ‘detectives’) to pull back a little more, enough to keep the story moving.
