THE HANGOVER
WARNER BROS
RELEASED 12 June 2009
Put four guys in Vegas for a stag weekend and you should have a funny movie, right?
It’s Doug Billings’ (Justin Bartha) wedding day weekend, and he’s off to the gambling capital of the world with three friends. Phil Wenneck (Bradley Cooper) is already married with kids and sounds like he’s almost had enough. Stu Price (Ed Helms) is a dentist, though he prefers the term doctor, and his fiancee is the biggest nag you can imagine, who also slept with a waiter which everyone knows about. Finally, there is Alan Garner (Zach Galifianakis), who’s not so much a friend as the brother of the bride-to-be Tracy Garner (Sasha Barrese). He’s distinctly weird, bearded, and obviously a bit of a loner with few friends. He’s desperate to be one of the boys. As the foursome leave their huge Vegas suite and head up to the roof, toasting the groom and looking forwards to a drunken fun night out, all is well with the world.
Next morning, neither Stu, Phil or Alan can remember anything about the night before. The groom Doug is nowhere to be found, the suite is totally trashed, Phil has a tooth missing, there’s a tiger in the bathroom, and there’s a baby in the cupboard. Oh, and the valet brings a police car to them! Over the rest of the day, the three guys gradually rebuild their missing evening and get closer to finding the groom, who only has hours to make his wedding day.
Using an ingenious idea of actually not showing the drunken night out, we get to discover the crazy antics gradually through people who were there on the following day. Some of them aren’t very happy about what happened (the real Mike Tyson being one), some of them are very happy (Heather Graham plays a stripper who has married one of the guys), and some of them are owed $80,000 after bad gambling in the casino. The comedy keeps coming as we discover increasingly bizarre situations.
Although all the actors handle their parts well, the real standouts in ‘The Hangover’ are Zach Galifianakis as the geeky, annoying future brother-in-law, and Ken Jeong as Mr Chow, a camp gangster who wants his money back. Jeong delivers some instantly quotable lines, and Galifianakis’ performance gets most of the laughs in the movie. It’ll be interesting so see if his routine changes in future movies or if he’s a one-trick-pony.
Stay during the end credits as a procession of photos illustrate the madcap night out we’ve spent the last hundred minutes finding out about.
FOUR OUT OF FIVE