Film review: The Hangover

Published on Saturday 13 June 2009 13:38

THE HANGOVER (15) Director: Todd Phillips Running time: 100 minutes ***

AS YOU might expect from something called The Hangover, this is a comedy designed to hurt your brain, not feed it; and makes no apologies for any damage it inflicts.

Two days before his wedding, Doug (Justin Bartha) leaves his anxious fiance for a final fling in Las Vegas with his best friends Phil (Bradley Cooper), a cocky married school- teacher, and Stu (Ed Helms), a timid dentist with a tyrannical girlfriend. You soon notice that in The Hangover, the women come in two easy-to-sort categories: shrill nags or tarts with hearts, while the men run the gamut from nice guy Doug to the childlike Alan (Zach Galifianakis), Doug's future brother-in-law who is either moronic or autistically super-smart but is certainly banned from going within 20 feet of any school.

When the men wake up the following day, they have not only acquired the titular hangovers but also a smouldering chair, a chicken, a bawling baby and a tiger in their hotel suite. The groom on the other hand has vanished. After trawling their pockets for clues, the guys retrace their steps to find Doug and piece together an eventful night which apparently included a gay Asian hitman, Mike Tyson irked at the loss of his favourite cat, a nice stripper (Heather Graham) representing the second variety of womankind, and Stu yanking out his own tooth to prove his dental skills. The reason they have no recollection of any of this is because Alan spiked their drinks.

A mind may be a terrible thing to waste but in films a memory is an excellent thing to lose. Otherwise you might recall that Phillips has been on this path before: nine years ago he made Road Trip, which also featured an open-road foursome of a regular Joe, a reprobate, a smartypants and an oddball. And like Road Trip – in fact, like pretty much every comedy of this ilk – The Hangover plays on the sexual and racial fears of a young white male audience. Despite their purported adulthood, our foursome are both frightened and fascinated by aggressive women, broad ethnic caricatures and anyone else's penis bar their own. This is not cutting edge cinema.

This is more like going on a stag weekend with people who sniff marker pens. Certainly chemical light-headedness may be the explanation for the film's chaotic visual style – or to put it another way, Todd Phillips' film looks like a wedding video shot by a drunk cousin.

What The Hangover has going for it is sheer comic effrontery. It's fearless about using every clich you have ever heard about Las Vegas.

It secures the services of Mike Tyson for a cameo, and then makes him play air drums along to Phil Collins' In The Air Tonight. It has a joke with the word "Holocaust" in it, and just about manages to carry it off.

This is a dumb film made by clever frat boys; they know how to push the envelope.

On general release from Friday