The Hangover oozes laughter as it doesn’t count so much on huge punch lines as much as it remains dedicated to keeping you smiling throughout. Directed by Old School helmer Todd Phillips, the film never gives the audience a chance to rest their face as your mouth will curl upwards right from the start and keep you in perma-grin for the duration with enough hearty laughs in-between to make this a bonafide contender for comedy of the year.
The movie begins with the phone call of doom from Las Vegas. Phil (Bradley Cooper) phones Doug’s fiancée to tell her Doug (Justin Bartha) is missing and they can’t find him even though he is supposed to be getting married in Los Angeles in five hours. “Yeah, that’s not gonna happen,” Phil tells her and we are off. The Hangover steps back in time previewing the events that led up to what must have been one of the wildest bachelor parties we will never see and therein lies this film’s mystery and brilliance. It’s a bachelor party movie that doesn’t rely on showing the audience the actual party. Instead we lay witness to Phil, Stu (Ed Helms) and Alan (Zach Galifianakis) as they struggle to piece together what happened the night before in an attempt to find the missing groom and all that’s left is for us to enjoy the insanity.
It seems hard to believe, but almost every step of the way The Hangover gets it exactly right. From a comedic aspect we watch as the trio try to figure out how one of them lost a tooth, how a baby got in their closet, how Mike Tyson’s tiger got in their bathroom and why the hotel valet just brought around their cop car. But even more important, along the way we actually begin to care about what happens to them, which is the one piece of this film I wasn’t ready for.
Stu is a dentist planning on proposing to a witch of a controlling woman; Phil is the playboy type yet his life is a bit more subdued involving a wife and a child; while Alan is the brother-in-law-to-be who isn’t all there upstairs. Despite their differences, these three manage to come together in a way most movies wouldn’t even attempt. Alan looks up to Phil as a younger brother would look up to his cool older brother, a relationship I thought sold the entire film. Phil laughs at Alan’s insane statements and never takes to putting him down even though that is exactly where this film could have, and would have, gone in the hands of most directors. It’s the joy, camaraderie and exasperation these three share throughout that makes the film so funny. I mean, what else is there to say after being beaten with a crow bar by a naked Korean mobster you found in your trunk than, “That guy was mean!” It’s comments such as this that send the movie over the top.
The glue holding all of this together is the performance of Galifianakis. While both Cooper and Helms are terrific in their performances, it wouldn’t have worked if Galifianakis played the role of Alan, the bearded and overweight newcomer to the group, with too much gusto. Galifianakis has managed to do in one film role what Dan Fogler was expected to do when he first hit the scene. But while Fogler tried to make audiences laugh with boisterous reactions, Galifianakis plays it cool and subdued, allowing the comedy to come out of his character naturally proving you don’t have to be loud and obnoxious to be funny, you just have to be… funny.
Another tribute to this film is that it isn’t trying to be a Judd Apatow knock-off, which seems to be the trend in Hollywood nowadays. The protagonists are stripped down and more realistic. When they have outbursts it sounds real as opposed to the sticky sweet characters in an Apatow feature that seem to occasionally suffer from bouts of uncontrollable cursing meant to be funny because they come out of nowhere, not because they are legitimately funny.
It’s been a long time since I actually found a traditional comedy this funny. Last year I enjoyed the black-comedy In Bruges and this year I already enjoyed the hell out of the Brit-comedy In the Loop, but it feels good to once again laugh at a Hollywood based R-rated comedy that doesn’t rely solely on sight gags and cursing for its only laughs. Walking out of The Hangover I honestly felt my face start to relax from laughter. This film is 100 minutes of comedy you aren’t going to want to miss.
