The Hangover

"Phil, we're not gonna leave a baby in the room -- there's a fucking tiger in the bathroom."

I was blown away by The Hangover, which is deftly-made and intelligent in addition to hilarious. I certainly wasn’t expecting this from Todd Phillips, whose fratty, low-brow comedies up until now have been occasionally amusing in a brute-force sort of way. This is a huge leap forward — and one of the funniest films of the year.

The plot is a familiar and obvious high concept: Three guys wake up in a Las Vegas hotel suite after a bachelor party, with no memory of the night’s events. That doesn’t seem so bad, except for that baby in the suite with them — who does it belong to? And, uh, a tiger. And one of them is missing a tooth, and appears to be married. And most importantly: they’ve lost the bachelor. And then things get really strange.

There is, of course, the very funny scene where the three partiers — the brash, attractive Phil (Bradley Cooper), the nerdy, neurotic Stu (Ed Helms), and the fat, singularly oafish Alan (Zach Galifianakis) — wake up to find their suite in ruins, the tiger, the baby, etc. There’s also a chicken. But the genius of The Hangover is that it keeps surprising you. As Phil, Stu and Alan attempt to piece together the events of the previous evening and recover their buddy in time for him to get married, the film springs a seemingly endless series of delightful surprises on them and on us. One such revelation, which occurs when the characters open the trunk of the father-in-law’s antique Mercedes, is responsible for the biggest belly laugh I’ve had in a long time.

But what renders The Hangover borderline transcendent — and what makes Todd Phillips’ work here remarkable — is that in addition to a steady stream of chuckles, the film generates momentum and something resembling suspense. There is significance to what happened last night: we want to find out. And there’s real urgency to finding the missing Doug (Justin Bartha) — I could almost imagine finding myself in this situation, sans, perhaps, the tiger and marriage. Phillips brings tension to the goofiest developments by tearing into them with utter conviction. There is a ridiculous sequence wherein the protagonists decide to obtain a desperately needed sum of money by counting cards in blackjack, for example, but look at how elegant and carefully constructed it is. Much of the film is similarly keen and meticulous.

At the same time, the movie rejects a mechanical approach to revealing the truth about the characters’ drunken escapades. There are no flashbacks at regular intervals, and not every next-day discovery has a corresponding explanation. (The chicken, for example, remains a mystery.) It turns out to be better this way — the movie introduces so many absurd directions that any attempt at an all-encompassing solution was bound to be unsatisfying. The Hangover does eventually resolve the whereabouts of Doug, of course, and the answer to that question turns out to be perfectly logical and beautifully simple.

I have a few minor hesitations about The Hangover. I couldn’t quite get on board with Zach Galifianakis’s shtick, which seemed a little insincere and desperate for a laugh. (I wasn’t not sure what to make of the repeated suggestion that he’s a registered sex offender, and that this was not a misunderstanding.) I probably could have done without the extended tasering scene, though it does have one fantastic payoff. But a few transgressions aside, I can hardly oversell the film, which is wonderful and refreshing and impressive. In the universe of high-profile summer comedies, it is a miracle. It has a real script and real performances (if I had my druthers, Bradley Cooper would be looking at a Best Supporting Actor nomination); it is constantly thinking; it is sweet when it needs to be, and it is hysterical.

-- Eugene Novikov

Released:	2009
Starring:	Zach Galifianakis, Bradley Cooper, Ed Helms, Ken Jeong, Jeffrey Tambor, Justin Bartha, Heather Graham
Directed by:	Todd Phillips
Rated:	R