Wild Hangover a Bender to Remember
Phil (Bradley Cooper), Stu (Ed Helms) and Alan (Zach Galifianakis) join their friend Doug (Justin Bartha) on a road trip to Las Vegas to celebrate his coming nuptials the beautiful Tracy (Sasha Barrese). After a wild night partying it up the three wakeup to a trashed suite, a chicken, a missing tooth and a gigantic tiger in the bathroom. On top of that, they can’t remember a single thing about the evening, the whole thing a blank spot in their very hung-over heads.
Bradley Cooper, Zach Galifianakis and Ed Helms in Warner Bros' The Hangover
Worse than everything, however, is that they can’t find Doug, the man vanishing seemingly without a trace. With the clock ticking, the wedding looming and Genesis loving Mike Tyson inquiring about his property Phil, Stu and Alan better figure out what the heck happened and fast, because if they don’t then all the things they can’t remember about their time in Vegas has absolutely no chance of staying there.
Unlike last years rather uninspiring What Happens in Vegas, the hysterical The Hangover actually ends up doing Sin City proud. This freewheeling dumb comedy of errors is an obnoxious load of fun, Jon Lucas and Scott Moore’s (the pair also wrote Ghosts of Girlfriends Past and Four Christmases) brazenly vulgar screenplay a far more hilarious collection of jokes and gags than I ever could have anticipated.
If anything, I’d go so far out on a limb and say that director Todd Phillips has resurrected his career with this effort. After the disastrous performance of School for Scoundrels (a movie I actually didn’t mind all that terribly) it almost seemed off like you could write the filmmaker off, the studio goodwill generated by Road Trip and Old School suddenly nothing more than a memory. Not only has he crafted his most confident, self-assured and downright funny effort, he’s also somehow managed to put together a rather sweet tale of friendship, all of it adding up to a winning comedy I think is a going to be a certain hit.
If I’m wrong, my guess would be because it does admittedly go on a bit too long and end up wrapping around a few too many tangents and subplots than it really needs to. There comes a point when I did find myself wondering when they were going to wrap the darn thing up, and by the time the trio was driving into the desert to meet up with a seedy gun-toting gambler I was a little bit ready to head on home.
But the majority of my quibbles are either minor (the gunfire seems a bit pointless, as does a brief moment of ill-placed homophobia) or have little to do with the movie itself (like what exactly happened to Heather Graham’s career and what in the world is she doing here). More than that, they do not distract from the absolute sensational nature of much of the comedy, all three of the leads having moments (especially Galifianakis) that had me almost doubled over falling on the theater floor in laughter.
There isn’t too much more to say than that. If I write too much I could end up inadvertently spoiling some of the gags, and considering how few studio comedies ever seem to work anymore that’s the last thing in the world I want ever want to do. The basic truth here and all a reader needs to know is that I think The Hangover is terrific, and as wild benders go this is one drunken stupor (and its messy aftermath) I can happily enable.
Film Rating: êêê (out of 4)
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