Just saw "Hangover 2" here in Bangkok at Central World this afternoon.
I've lived in Bangkok pretty much full time since September 1999, although I travel frequently to Europe, the USA, Japan, China, Taiwan. Bangkok is my home base.
As usual, Hollywood did not do any justice to this great nation full of hardworking and creative people. Hollywood seems to WANT to portray Bangkok as a filthy, lawless, dangerous, corrupt, crime-ridden and chaotic city. It's not that way at all.
My apartment is about 200 meters away from a vacant lot where the movie production trucks for Hangover 2 were parked for about a month last year.
Delta Airlines does fly to Bangkok (via Tokyo) but it lands around the same time as United, about midnight, not during the day. The airport shown in the scene where the plane lands is NOT Bangkok. I can't tell where it is. The Delta flight is not 16 hours, it's about 21 hours (including the 3 hour layover in Tokyo). There is an LAX-BKK nonstop on Thai Airways and it's 17 hours. I tried the non-stop last year one time and it's painfully long, even in business class.
The wedding in the movie appears to be at a 5 star resort in either Phuket or Krabi, on the Andaman (Indian Ocean) side of the country. You CANNOT take a boat from Bangkok to that area without going all the away around Malaysia and Singapore. It would take a speedboat about 48 continuous hours of travel. The flight is about 1 hour from Bangkok to Krabi or Phuket.
A Thai father would never insult his son-in-law-to-be in front of others, especially at a wedding party like that. First of all, he would have had to approve of the marriage in the first place. Thai people are generally very non-confrontational until pushed to the edge (then all hell breaks loose!!!)
If you wanted to crash in that filthy room that the protagonists wake up in after their crazy night out, you would have to look very very hard. In Bangkok there are many small hotels where you could sleep off the night's excesses, and most are reasonably clean and safe. Again, the movie producers purposely WANTED Bangkok to look sleazy and dirty. Thai hoteliers generally strive to keep their rooms as clean as possible, even if the building is old and out-dated. My apartment building is about 25 years old, and my apartment is about $300/month, but the janitors do their damnedest to keep the trash picked up and the floors swept every day.
The go-go bars on Soi Cowboy are all owned by Thai people (police and military), not by Arabs. You would never see a gun being bought or sold in one of those places, but I haven't been to that kind of place in many years.
The notion of foreigners starting a riot in Patpong, throwing molotov cocktails, etc., is ridiculous. The Royal Thai Police would have thrown them in all in jail if they had started something like that...or they would have had the crap beaten out of them by Thai guys.
This movie is incredibly stupid and an insult to Thailand. I am surprised that they even let them film the movie here.