The Hangover

There have been a lot of films about wild Vegas toots, from the abysmal (Very Bad Things) to the sublime (Go!), but the genre may have to be retired after The Hangover, which exhausts all the elements of the blowout Sin City bachelor party. The movie is rude, profane, and very funny--I haven't laughed so much since Superbad.

The set-up is pretty simple--four guys head to the desert for a bachelor party. Three of them, including the groom, are old friends, while the fourth is the bride's brother, who is decidedly weird (I think his defining line of dialogue is when he's told that card-counting at blackjack is illegal, but he replies, "It's frowned upon, like masturbating on an airplane.") They toast the groom on the roof of Caesar's Palace, and the next thing they know they wake up in their suite, the place a disaster area, with a chicken wandering around, a live tiger in the bathroom, a baby in the closet, and the groom is nowhere to be found.

The meat of the film is the three remaining hangover sufferers piecing together what just happened the night before. The hotel room is a classic bit of art direction, and as the camera pans it the audience that I was with was howling with laughter. Evidence of debauchery mounts--the hen-pecked dentist (Ed Helms) discovers he's missing a tooth; the callow schoolteacher (Bradley Cooper) has a hospital bracelet on his wrist, and the Ewokish brother-in-law (Zach Galifianakis) delights in manipulating the baby's arm in rude gestures.

Eventually the baby is returned to his mother, a woman that Helms, to his horror, discovers he married the night before. The drunken wedding-chapel marriage is well-worn territory--it's been done everywhere from the TV show Friends to last year's What Happens in Vegas, but Helms is so pitch-perfect that we can excuse the cliche, even if his new bride, Heather Graham, is right out of a Penthouse Forum fantasy (she's a stripper and a hooker).

As these three hapless guys try to find the groom, they discover more and more of the things they did the night before, such as stealing a police car, locking a Chinese man in the trunk of their Mercedes, and breaking into Mike Tyson's compound. Not all of it is funny--the Chinese character edges into caricature, and Tyson's scenes fall flat. I would have preferred to see the encounters with Vegas personalities Carrot Top or Wayne Newton, which are hinted at in the closing credits.

Another problem is the character of Helms' Xanthippe girlfriend, played by Rachel Harris, who is such a harridan that it's hard to believe anyone would tolerate her for more than five minutes. But any faults the film has are excusable because of the bonhomie created by the laughs generated by the film in general.

The Hangover is directed by Todd Phillips, who specializes in films that are better than their time-worn premises, like the Road Trip and Old School. This one fits right in with his oeuvre.