The Hangover

Review: The Hangover

Dir. Todd Phillips

100mins

Cert 18

2009

It sucks to wake up not recalling what you did last night. You rummage in your pockets, check for evidence of whatever the hell happened, and prepare yourself to make hurried apologies to people whom you don’t even remember.

Turns out that from an outsider’s perspective, this looks freakin’ hilarious.

After a heavy night on the booze in Las Vegas, three guys realise that their bachelor party has gone monstrously wrong; they’ve lost the groom. A sharply-scripted combination of buddy comedy and light mystery, it’s the funniest thing I’ve seen all year. To their credit, the guys (Bradley Cooper, Ed Helms and Zach Galifianikis) do an incredible job of piecing together the previous night’s events through what is clearly a waking nightmare of a hangover. Their mission is simple: retrace their liquored-up steps and recover the missing groom (Justin Bartha) in time for his wedding. Frankly, anyone who can solve a mystery despite feeling like they have a rat in their brain has my respect. This might be how any great detective would operate in the throes of the morning after; who’s to say that Sherlock Holmes would have performed any better after a heavy night on the opium?

But there’s more to the movie that simply finding the groom; it’s an absolute riot to watch these poor guys realise that after a few hours on the sauce, they all become complete animals. Their hazy journey of self-discovery - all the while bickering and screwing things up even worse than they were before - reveals the depth of their alcohol-fueled error. The laughs keep coming at a steady rate, each fragment of the night before a self-contained anecdote and a lead onto the next loopy revelation. Why is there a live tiger in the bathroom? Where is Stu’s missing tooth? And why is a naked Chinese gangster (Ken Jeong) trying to beat the guys to death with a crowbar? Our queasy Quincys embark on a scavenger hunt across Vegas to rediscover their lost memories - and hopefully Doug, the groom. It’s a pretty smart set-up; as a movie the night in question would quickly have become tedious, but as a madcap tangle of bizarre evidence, it hits all the right comedy notes.

The cast is far from A-list, but together they become more than the sum of their generic parts. The de facto leader, Phil (Cooper) is a married schoolteacher who’s thrilled at the chance to misbehave with a reckless abandon that suggests that he never intends to go back to his life; Stu (Helms) is a dorky dentist whose spirit is being slowly crushed by his bitch of a girlfriend, but who, after a few drinks, becomes one of the coolest guys you’ll ever meet. And then there’s Alan (Galifianikis). Alan defies definition; describing himself as ‘a one-man wolf pack’, he’s just plain weird. A chunky, bearded, overgrown child and implied sexual deviant, Alan winds up stealing half the film with his sub-normal antics.

The Hangover is about as good as dumb summer comedies come, and the added element of mystery is the icing on the cake. It’s nicely acted, cleverly scripted (aside from a painful guest spot by Mike Tyson, who handles comedy about as gently as he handles women) and most importantly is uproariously funny. Despite the appalling state in which the guys find themselves, it’s hard not to wish that you could have joined in the night before. By the looks of things, it was well worth the price of the morning after.

8/10

-James