Review #618: 'The Hangover' (2009)

Three close friends and the groom's strange brother-in-law travel to Vegas for a bachelor party they will never forget. Teacher Phil (Bradley Cooper) is a womaniser with a wife and kids, Stu (Ed Helms) is in an unhappy marriage with an overbearing, abusive wife, Doug (Justin Bartha) is the groom hoping for a send-off to end all send-off's, and Alan (Zach Galifianakis), is a naive man-child hoping to make friends. When they wake up in the morning, they find their suite demolished, a tiger in the bathroom, a baby in the closet, and most worryingly of all, Doug is missing. They clean themselves up and set out to find Doug, and using the various clues lying around, they begin to piece together the night.

Of course, bachelor party movies are hardly hard to come by, and they have been a staple of the gross-out comedy circuit since the 1980's. The Hangover finds its originality in the fact that it focuses on the morning after, rather than the actual night itself, which we see none of. It also has a sense of believability, as if three of the characters have genuinely been friends for years, and are gradually accepting the increasingly strange Alan into their wolf-pack. After all, Alan is often unnervingly strange, but the group find him funny too, and why wouldn't they? Cult stand-up comedian Galifianakis has been around for years, starring in various failed pilots and never quite getting the attention he deserved, but he is by far the best thing in The Hangover, with the mixture of his quite sweet innocence and his random one-liners fitting in with the film's heartfelt moments.

It also keeps the gross humour thankfully down to a minimum. Sure it's often bad taste, but there's a noticeable lack of bare-breasted women and any jokes involving bodily fluids. This is still R-rated, but the humour is in the script and the performances, and doesn't resort to someone shitting themselves for desperate laughs. It's similar in many ways to 2007's Superbad, where the language was filthy, but the laughs were genuine, and the situations, however absurd, still felt somewhat real. And when the credits rolled, I was left with that unfamiliar desire to spend more time with these characters. Special mention must also go to Chinese gangster Mr. Chow (played by Ken Jeong, who simply needs to be in more films), who has one of the best comedy burn lines in history, "so long, gay boys!".


Directed by: Todd Phillips
Starring: Bradley Cooper, Ed Helms, Zach Galifianakis, Justin Bartha, Heather Graham, Ken Jeong
Country: USA/Germany

Rating: ****

Tom Gillespie