Remember when comedies not produced by Judd Apatow didn’t have to be about being chased by CG dinosaurs or fighting an evil Egyptian Pharaoh with Amelia Earhart? Or how about when a comedy didn’t have to star every A, B, C and D-List comedian on the planet? Me neither, but “The Hangover” is the exception.
Here is a simple, funny comedy with a not completely outrageous premise and a few characters that are familiar but not total cliché stereotypes. Doug, Phil, Stu and Alan are four guys on the way to Vegas for Doug’s bachelor party. We see them make a toast and have a drink on the roof of the hotel, and the next morning, none of them can remember anything, their room is trashed with hundreds of unexplainable details, and Doug has gone missing. What we’re left with is three characters on a kind of mystery quest to piece together everything that happened the previous evening.
What I first admire about the film is the fact that we do not see a moment of their evening before they wake up hung-over. No montages, no flashbacks and no goofy images and set ups for later on. We start the morning from scratch, and the many intricate details of the plot direct the comedy and not the other way around. And I will say, it’s very entertaining to discover the reasons behind a tiger in the bathroom, a missing baby, one of the character’s lost tooth, a stolen cop car, a naked, hostile Chinese man and the eventual location of Doug.
Then there are the characters that you would never call likable but are certainly relatable. There’s Phil (Bradley Cooper), the good-looking, hotshot, over-confident asshole. Then there’s Stu (Ed Helms from “The Office”), the stuck-up, “mature” pessimist. And lastly is Alan (Zach Galifianakis), the shy, pudgy, socially awkward oddball about to be Doug’s brother-in-law. These are all character types we’ve seen before, but they always remain within their range of personality, not changing like some Will Ferrell type who puts on a different persona whenever he feels it should suit his random sense of humor.
These superb performances show potential in these actors. From here, Bradley Cooper is bound to get fewer roles as the comedic antagonist or as characters in bad romantic comedies. Given some time, Ed Helms will become bigger than the rest of “The Office” cast combined. And as for Galifianakis, he seems to be the first overweight support character not trying to be Seth Rogen.
Reflecting back, I can’t defend all of “The Hangover’s” unnecessarily random, aggressive and raunchy material, but it works. It’s found a concept and a cast that suits it, and it will keep audiences wondering how such a familiar story about how even yet another wild night in Vegas manages to be so entertaining.
3 stars