Movie Review: ‘The Hangover’

Todd ‘Old School' Phillips returns with a side-splittingly un-PC comedy.
Movie Review: ‘The Hangover’
Zach Galifianakis, Bradley Cooper and Ed Helms confront the cold light of day in 'The Hangover'
6/11/2009
Updated:
10/1/2015
<a><img src="https://www.theepochtimes.com/assets/uploads/2015/09/ENThangover3.jpg" alt="Zach Galifianakis, Bradley Cooper and Ed Helms confront the cold light of day in 'The Hangover'" title="Zach Galifianakis, Bradley Cooper and Ed Helms confront the cold light of day in 'The Hangover'" width="320" class="size-medium wp-image-1827924"/></a>
Zach Galifianakis, Bradley Cooper and Ed Helms confront the cold light of day in 'The Hangover'
The latest laughfest from serial funny film-maker Todd Phillips, The Hangover is one-third Phillips’ own adults-behaving-badly Old School, one-third underrated 90s Vegas stag-do flick Very Bad Things and one-third the type of line-crossing comedy currently spearheaded by Jody “Observe & Report” Hill.

In short it is belly-achingly, guffawingly, crassly, offensively, howlingly funny.

As a story, The Hangover is simplicity itself, but its parts far outweigh the mediocre sounding whole: four guys, one stag-do, Vegas. After a night of debauchery, the three groomsmen wake up in their trashed hotel suite one groom-less. What follows is a fill-in-the-blanks run around Sin City that clues us into exactly what went on the night before and just how Phil (Bradley Cooper – Wedding Crashers) ended up paying a visit to hospital, Stu (Ed Helms – The Daily Show) lost a tooth, Alan (Zach Galifianakis – Tru Calling) ends up with somebody else’s baby, the groom (Justin Bartha – National Treasure) gets lost, and how a tiger came to be in the bathroom.

And those are just the set-up scenarios, for as our intrepid “heroes” start to unravel exactly what went on the night before in search of their soon-to-be-wed bud the set-pieces only increase in size, absurdity and hilarity (of which nothing will be revealed here for spoilerage reasons). Let’s just say the hotel valet wheeling round a stolen police cruiser instead of their soft-top sports car is only the beginning.

To watch the ensuing mayhem, however, you can’t be of the sensitive variety as most of the humour here is of the un-PC variety. So if you’re the sort of person that is easily offended then you really should steer clear and go see Night at the Museum 2.

The catch of the flick though is not the escalating outlandish events that our trio find themselves in, but the buddy chemistry that they share. Individually they have their moments to shine, and indeed they could each own this film if they wanted. But they generously and unpretentiously acknowledge this and work for the goodness of the film as a whole, not their breakout turn. Of course the by-product is that each main player (Cooper/Helms/Galifianakis) does turn in a breakout performance here and will surely go on to headline bigger (but not necessarily better) things.

Come the movie’s satisfying conclusion you’ll be with these guys every step of the way, each of them having wormed their way into your heart. But don’t head for the exits too soon, because there might just be a credits treat that eclipses any of the hilarity that has preceded it.

[etRating value=“ 4”]