Australian Box Office Results: 'The Hangover II' On Top

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The Hangover II has topped the Australian box office for the second week running.

The comedy sequel, which stars Bradley Cooper, Zach Galifianakis and Ed Helms, generated more than $5 million in ticket sales.

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Hangover 3 to be set in Ireland?

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It looks like The Hangover is about to confirm that Ireland is the party capital of the world. Actor Bradley Cooper has let slip a possible plot point for 'The Hanover 3', speaking to The Herald he said Hollywood bosses were considering Dublin as a setting for the next installment in the hit comedy franchise.

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Renee Zellweger Furious With Bradley Cooper

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Renee Zellweger has been left rocked by claims her ex-boyfriend Bradley Cooper has hooked up with actress Olivia Wilde.

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Bradley Cooper says 'Hangover Helped My Career'

Bradley Cooper has 'more doors opened' to him since he appeared in 'The Hangover'.

The 36-year-old actor - who began his career with a small part on 'Sex and the City' opposite Sarah Jessica Parker - is thankful for the 2009 comedy movie, but still has to audition to get parts.

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The Hangover Part II: North American ticket sales expected to exceed $100 Million

There will be no headache for "The Hangover Part II" this holiday weekend, with North American ticket sales expected to exceed $100 million.

And unlike the pain of last Memorial Day, there should be no holiday headache for Hollywood, either, with several strong movies in the marketplace likely to boost this year's total for one of the busiest movie-going periods of the year to well over $200 million.

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'The Hangover Part II' a Funny, Formulaic, Desperately Shocking Carbon Copy

Business and creative people go together as well as fine wine at a burger joint. Riding on the heels of the monumentally profitable “The Hangover,” in “The Hangover Part II” the brass win out over the artists.

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Film Review: The Hangover: Part II

The headache has truly set in for the laboured and self-conscious The Hangover Part II. It's more a remake than a sequel.

We all enjoyed ourselves during that first movie. But now … well, the hangover has begun. And begun so powerfully, so oppressively, that you might almost suspect the success of the original was created specifically to engender this comedown as a piece of conceptual art. 

Each reminder of the original, each repetition, each desperate, hair-of-the-dog attempt to recapture the party feeling: it's exactly like living through a hungover flashback-memory of what had once seemed so great.

In Hollywood, said William Goldman, nobody knows anything. Who knew The Hangover, from fratpack comedy director Todd Phillips, was going to be such a huge hit? Nobody – perhaps not even the people involved. The story of a Vegas bachelor party that goes horribly wrong looked pretty ropey on paper, and yet it was great. Some thought it was sort of a monkey-typing-Hamlet fluke, but it's actually the sort of fluke that only happens to smart people who keep trying.

The Hangover was funny and the structure was daring. Act one: pre-party – then we jump straight to act three, post-party, and the movie is about the bleary, amnesiac guys trying to piece together act two: what the hell happened? This is not definitively revealed until the sequence of digital photos over the final credits. Brilliant! It showed the spirit of movies like The Usual Suspects or Reservoir Dogs.Bradley Cooper had the chops – he had been a forgettable, almost invisible presence in many movies before this, but he blossomed in H1. There were some cracking comedy turns. Zach Galifianakis was great as the weirdo brother-in-law Alan and Ken Jeong was a real find as the abusive comedy gangster Mr Chow. Everything came together.

Sadly, H2 can't even quite claim the credit of being the first Hangover sequel: the road-movie comedy Due Date, directed by Todd Phillips and starring Galifianakis and Robert Downey Jr, attempted to cash in on its success, none too successfully. At least it tried a vaguely different plot. Hangover Part II seeks only to repeat almost every element of the first movie. It's not a sequel, closer to a shot-for-shot remake. This time, the guys go to Thailand for a wedding, in the same shark-jumping way that the Sex and the City girls whooshed off to Abu Dhabi for their profoundly depressing sequel. It feels a bit like a feature-length Christmas special of a well-loved British sitcom.

The original's quirks have now become a formula. The grim daytime shots of Vegas at the beginning are now grim daytime shots of Bangkok; the tiger is now a monkey; there's a different sequence of photos over the final credits. Pretty much everything has its equivalent. Infuriatingly, all the fun has been drained from the movie, simply in repeating almost every trick. The same: but lame, and lame because the same.

Now it's the nerdy dentist Stu (Ed Helms) getting hitched, to a beautiful Thai woman Lauren (Jamie Chung), whose father hates Stu. Slightly insultingly for Justin Barth, his character Doug was the groom-to-be who disappeared in the first movie but he doesn't get a turn at participating in the hi-jinks now.

Stu stays in the story and Barth's nice-but-dull character is sidelined. Stu's goofiness is evidently considered more important to the action, and Phillips perhaps considers that the gang already has a handsome guy in the form of Cooper's Phil. 

Now it's the bride's sweet younger brother Teddy who tags along on the stag night, disappears, and has to be found at all costs, because he is the apple of his father's eye: he is played by 21-year-old Mason Lee, son of the director Ang Lee. Jeong and Galifianakis seem very subdued and under-par compared to their earlier appearances.

Then there's the question of the big non-PC cameo to match Mike Tyson's bizarre performance in the original. Rumours have been rife. We had heard about Mel Gibson (that idea was abandoned), Liam Neeson (reportedly cut) and even Bill Clinton.

Actually, Paul Giamatti makes an appearance as a bad-tempered tough guy, but this isn't the big cameo – that comes in the form of the celebrity booked to sing at Stu's wedding. You may be hoping for Liza Minnelli. Well, no spoilers, but suffice it to say, this too is a bit of a letdown.

Making The Hangover Part II must have been like going up to a great guitarist who'd just pulled off a brilliant improvised solo, and telling him he had to repeat the performance the next night, note-for-note. The result is self-conscious to say the least.

I have to admit that there are one or two nice lines. When the guys gather outside Alan's bedroom, preparing to invite him along, Jeffrey Tambor, playing Alan's father, tells them to "Go in slowly; let him acclimatise." When Stu defiantly claims: "There's a demon in me!", Alan hits him with a zinging comeback in the bad-taste spirit of the first film. Flashes of fun like this are rare. It's a sobering experience.

'The Hangover 2' drunk on formula, not originality

For anyone who has seen "The Hangover" and loved it, it won't come as any big surprise to see that adage at work in "The Hangover Part II."

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The Hangover II: It's never quite as fun the second time

Director Todd Phillips’s modus operandi when crafting the The Hangover Part II was clearly thus: If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

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Bradley Cooper

WHY IS HE FAMOUS

Thanks to box office hits like Yes Man, He's Just Not That Into You and The Hangover, American actor Bradley Cooper has escaped from the over-populated "Oh, I know that guy" acting pool and has started headlining the "Hey, it's Bradley Cooper" list amidst a crop of growing supporters. Until now, he hasn't been at the point where audiences are lining up just to see him. We expect that's all about to change with his upcoming film Limitless, in which Cooper stars alongside Robert De Niro and Abbie Cornish as a writer who discovers a top-secret drug that gives him super-human abilities. 

Bradley Cooper Quote

" The only bachelor party that I've ever been to was in Palm Springs with five guys playing golf. "

75 MAGNETISM

Bradley Cooper's confident swagger resonates well with the fairer sex. He's very clear about what he finds attractive in a woman -- namely a natural style that emphasizes T-shirts and underwear over trashy makeup and clothes that leave no skin to the imagination (no dice, Paris Hilton). A solid believer in relationship chemistry and date ideas that are original and unforgettable (think bungee jumping), Bradley Cooper also asks that women accept his evening habit of watching The Charlie Rose Show while eating Ben & Jerry's ice cream.

Bradley Cooper has been involved in several high-profile relationships. In 2005, he dated Jamie King, his costar on Kitchen Confidential, but ended up marrying Spin City actress Jennifer Esposito a year later. Unfortunately, Bradley Cooper wasn't the one to reverse Hollywood's short-term marriage trend (we'll leave that to you, Pamela Anderson), and he divorced Esposito a year later. 

Cooper is now dating Renee Zellweger (the two have been a couple for over a year and a half), and he has denied rumors linking him to Cameron Diaz and Jennifer Aniston.

52 SUCCESS

Bradley Cooper is an accomplished actor on stage, in movies and also on television. We say "accomplished" because he has already mastered two of the essential roles that every male actor needs for career survival: the heartless jerk and the supportive best friend. As a brash, adulterous hothead in Wedding Crashers, he made touch football look dangerous and made Dick Cheney's hunting skills look sharp. In projects like Alias and Yes Man, Bradley Cooper eased nicely into the "best friend" role -- you know, the friend who will support the story's main character, even if the lead is a spy who puts lives in danger or a slightly crazy guy who will say yes to anything.

With the jerk and the best friend roles firmly in his corner, Bradley Cooper is now gearing up to make the roles of comedy lead and hero his own. His characterization of the de facto leader of the group in The Hangover somehow made headaches and double-vision fun (again?), while his interpretation of Faceman in the big-screen A-Team made him a friend of neglected 1980s TV fans.

While it was The Hangover that turned Bradley Cooper into what industry types call a "bankable" star, he is now attempting his transition from member-of-the-gang to his first leading role in his upcoming film Limitless. We're rooting for him, but if it doesn't work out, The Hangover Part II (out in May) provides an eagerly anticipated fallback plan.

BRADLEY COOPER BIOGRAPHY

Bradley Cooper, he caught the acting bug from an elephant -- or more specifically an elephant man. A native of Pennsylvania, Cooper had just completed an honors degree in English from Georgetown University when he developed an uncontrollable urge to head to the Big Apple and try acting. This urge was due to a long appreciation for the acting craft, courtesy of The Elephant Man, a movie that left a lasting impression on him. After successfully gaining acceptance into New York's prestigious Actors Studio Drama School, he learned from the best (like acting legend Ellen Burstyn) and played John Merrick (the real-life Elephant Man) for his thesis project.

Before he had even graduated from the Actors Studio, Bradley Cooper began paying his acting and pop culture lexicon dues with a one-shot guest appearance as Jake on Sex and the City in 1998. The experience of working on a female-driven show would come in handy later on. After co-starring in the feature film Wet Hot American Summer and hosting Lifetime's travel and nature-themed Treks in a Lonely World in 2000, Bradley Cooper won a starring role on The $treet, the newest New York-set brainchild of Sex and the City creator Darren Star. Unfortunately, longevity wasn’t in the cards, and the series was scrapped after less than 15 episodes.

Bradley Cooper Stars On Alias And Wedding Crashers

With his schooling complete and a promising career temporarily derailed by uncertainty, Bradley Cooper switched coasts and moved to Los Angeles. He also auditioned for the role of Clay, a journalist and friend to a spy whose life is stupendously complicated. The show was called Alias and by the time it launched in 2001, Clay was renamed Will. In no time, the show's ardent popularity made She-Spies sexy, Jennifer Garner tabloid material and slapped J.J. Abrams with the tag of television genius.

Bradley Cooper was a regular on Alias for two seasons before leaving to pursue other opportunities on the entertainment circuit. The most notable one came in 2005, as he took on the role of the cheating lout "Sack" Lodge in Wedding Crashers, the movie that capitalized on the long-at-play male ritual of picking up at weddings. Not content to just injure Vince Vaughn's character in an innocent touch football game, he also fired a few shots into his backside during a hunting trip gone wrong. A likable character he was not, but a perfect one to incite laughter and hate from audiences, he most certainly was. Mission accomplished.

Bradley Cooper Stars In Yes Man And The Hangover

Hot from Wedding Crashers, Bradley Cooper took his heat into the kitchen for the chef-inspired FOX series, Kitchen Confidential. Low ratings turned any heat down for good and the show was canceled. After a Broadway stage run with Julia Roberts and Paul Rudd in Three Days of Rain and a recurring role on Nip/Tuck, Cooper went back to focusing his primary attention on films. In 2008, he played best buddy to Jim Carrey's Yes Man, watching in disbelief while his friend said yes to every opportunity, including over-matched bar fights and horny old ladies -- dentures and all.

If 2001 was Bradley Cooper's breakout year on television, 2009 was his breakout year in film. He started by playing a man caught between Jennifer Connelly and Scarlett Johansson (there are worse places to be) in He's Just Not That into You. Next was the surprise summer hit The Hangover, where he played a smug teacher who finances a bachelor party in Vegas by ripping off his students. His role also required him to take on the none-too-pleasant tasks of wrestling a naked gangster and dry-humping Mike Tyson's tiger against a police car. After playing a camera man who resorts to playing mind games with Sandra Bullock's crossword puzzle builder (who wouldn't?) in All About Steve, Bradley Cooper will begin experiencing '80s flashbacks and entering the realm of television folklore as Lt. Templeton"'Faceman" Peck in the 2010 big-screen version of The A-Team.

Bradley Cooper Stars In Limitless And The Hangover Part II

With his breakout film debuts far behind him, Bradley Cooper still has a lot to prove, but he's finally getting his chance to join the 30-something A-list. Alongside actors like Jake Gyllenhaal, Ryan Reynolds and, to some degree, Channing Tatum, Cooper is steadily making his way to the top. 

In his upcoming film Limitless, which will be released March 18th, Bradley Cooper plays a wannabe-writer (Eddie Morra) who discovers NZT, a drug that allows him to use 100% of his brainpower. On NZT, Eddie writes a best-selling novel, makes a fortune and revels in the company of gorgeous women. The movie costars Robert De Niro and Abbie Cornish. 

We're thinking Limitless could be the perfect move for the actor in order to broaden his range, but regardless of whether or not it bombs, we'll be looking forward to The Hangover Part II (out in May). In the sequel, Phil, Stu, Alan, and Doug travel to Bangkok for Stu's wedding. Mike Tyson will make another appearance, as will Liam Neeson.