Todd Phillips’ new comedy The Hangover has no insight, no emotional crux, and no driving artistic purpose other to be funny, and boy, is it ever funny.
The story involves an overnight trip to Vegas that includes, but is not limited to: A chicken, a baby, a tiger, a stolen police car, an Asian gangster, a chapel, a wedding singer who does renditions of 50 Cent songs and Mike Tyson.
Why? Well, for no better reason than because these things are funny. This is a rare film that’s every operation is performed in the name of comedy: every line is a punch line, every action is a sight gag and every plot twist is a comic reversal. It mimics the ethos of that scene in Juno where she tells Paulie Bleeker that he is so totally cool without ever really trying only for him to respond that he actually tries really hard.
What’s strange is that The Hangover is actually a good movie: well made and well acted to the point where the audience sort of actually cares what happens to these helpless boobs and so masterfully plotted that all of these things, in their own twisted kind of way, make perfect sense, which, of course, makes it even funnier.
A Night in Vegas
Here’s the story: four guys, the prudish Stu (The Office’s Ed Helms), the carefree sleaze Phil (future star leading man Bradley Cooper), the nearly handicapped Alan (Zack Galifianakis) and the engaged Doug (National Treasure’s Justin Bartha) all head to Vegas for a bachelor party before Doug is to be married a couple days later.
The night begins well enough, lodged in an exquisite villa suite at Caesar’s Palace (not the real Caesar’s Palace Alan finds out because, well, Caesar never actually lived there), with a shot or two of Jager on the rooftop, until the men wake up the next morning with a baby in the closet, a tiger in the bathroom, no sign of Doug and not the foggiest memory of how these things came to be.
That’s the plot description. The men have to put the puzzle together, one piece at a time, in hopes of finding their friend and getting him home before he is to be married. What they discover and how they discover this critic dares not even hint at.
Kafkaesque?
On paper, the plot description sounds like a mess of random comedic episodes that all try desperately for a laugh, but the comedy is so well plotted and Phillips so masterfully in control of his tone that it pulls off a tricky feat.
The story is so comically surreal that it seems to be unfolding in an alternate universe that takes on the guise of Vegas, but the dots, no matter how improbable, connect so seamlessly that it never feels as though it is overstretching the realms of human possibility, making it, you guessed it, even funnier.
In that sense the film is strangely similar to that most underrated of Scorsese masterpieces After Hours, which sees a mookish copy editor venture out looking for a sexual encounter one night and ends being hilariously pursued by a crazed gang through the streets of Soho who believe him a thief and a murderer.
If The Hangover weren’t so deviously perverse it would be considered Kafkaesque. Neat trick, eh?
Stars are Born
But the film’s success lies in its stars and their ability to recite razor-sharp dialogue as if, and here’s the key, they were actually talking, not trying to be funny.
Take Alan, who is played by Zach Galifianakis, and, let’s face it, steals the show. A bad actor would play this sidekick comic relief part as if he knew he was the funniest thing in the movie (see Dan Fogler do a hatchet job to the same kind of character in the horrible Fanboys), but Galifianakis is too gifted a performer for that and instead builds an original character from the ground up.
Alan isn’t funny, stupidity just comes naturally to him, and you love him for it. Watch how Galifinanakis delivers lines of dialogue like, “We couldn’t remember anything last night. Remember?” and one will begin to see the next great star of comedy emerging. Or take this exchange:
Stu: I can’t believe I gave my grandma’s Holocaust ring to someone I don’t even know.
Alan: I didn’t know they gave out rings during the Holocaust.
There haven’t been lines of dialogue that unashamedly funny since the”Don’t call me Shirley” days of the Airplane and Naked Gun movies.
Verdict
And that’s it. The movie is funny and then it ends, waiting until the next viewing when it will be funny again.
It isn’t sweet, caring, charming, concerned for the well being of anyone, and doesn’t even care if it’s likeable or not despite always somehow managing to be; as long as it’s getting a laugh. Good for it.
There aren’t many comedies for adults, about adults anymore. The only way to rate its success then, is in whether or not the viewer laughed. This critic laughed a lot.
