The Hangover

(2009)

Directed by

Todd Phillips

Review by Zach Saltz

Posted - 6/12/10

(This is a reaction and commentary of Todd's review of The Hangover.  The sections in black are passages from Todd's review.  The sections in red are reactions and commentary.)

The Hangover is a movie that I was not looking forward to…at all. I thought the trailer looked really stupid and juvenile, but when the reviews came out, I was mildly encouraged. I was too, especially with the sudden rise to fame of Zach Galifianakis, standing up for the vastly underrepresented number of Zachs who aren’t surfer dudes. I still thought it looked terrible, but I was able to imagine how the movie could muster up some sort of decency. Hey, did anyone think Sean Penn would win go on to win two Oscars when Fast Times first came out? Sadly, it was as I originally suspected. I should have gone with my gut. Yes, Todd . . . The Hangover is gut-wrenchingly funny!

The movie is a typical Vegas comedy. OK, Todd, name is typical Vegas comedy that is actually good. Honeymoon in Vegas? Vegas Vacation? 3000 Miles to Graceland? Vegas for some reason is a dead zone for comedies. That’s why Leaving Las Vegas is the best Vegas movie ever.  Doug (Justin Bartha, of National Treasure) is getting married. And his fiancee’s a hottie!  The film starts out with a phone call from his friend Phil (Bradley Cooper) to Doug’s wife, saying that they lost Doug, and they have no idea how, where, or when. Hey, that’s your problem if you’re foolish leave your groom to Zach Galifianakis for the weekend. This takes place chronologically near the end of the movie, so we get to find out exactly how they got to that point. Though there are still plenty of loose holes, understandably . . . It turns out that the bachelor party was in Las Vegas, and due to a drug dealing mix-up at a liquor store, Alan (Zach Galifianakis), one of Doug’s best buds, accidentally drugged the whole group with Ruffies, the date rape drug. Incorrect. Alan is Doug’s future brother-in-law, and the two really don’t know each other, exemplified by Doug’s apprehensions about taking Alan with him. So Phil, Alan, and Stu (the hilarious Ed Helms) set out to find out what happened the night before. I thought Helms was the least funny of the three.  Same with his character on The Office.  Too similar to Steve Carell in his mannerisms. This includes stealing a tiger from Mike Tyson, a wedding with a prostitute/stripper named Jade (Heather Graham), and a stolen cop car. Gotta be the best stolen cop car scene since . . . well, Pineapple Express. I wish I could have seen any part of that, but sadly, we only get the dissatisfying day after hangover, with a few photos in the end. I think the title The Hangover sufficiently tells us what the movie is going to be about.  If you wanted to see a movie about drunken parties,

I believe that the movie’s problems start and end with Todd Phillips. I am not a fan of this director. Every one of his films gets some hype, and none of them live up to it. Old School was ok, I guess. Starsky and Hutch was decent. Oh come on!  It was awesome.  It even made my “Honorable Mention” list for the Best Comedies of the 2000s.  The scene where they act as mimes at the birthday party is hilarious.  Road Trip was mindless fun, but still too silly to call “good”. Then came The Hangover, which had the potential to be a pretty good film with heart, but ended up just being another party comedy to add to the scrapbook. But you just said it wasn’t a party movie – you said you wanted to see more partying!  There are some funny parts, no question about that. Yes, and most of them involved Galifianakis.  Like it only takes five minutes for us to see his hairy ass onscreen (at least ten minutes before I was expecting to see it.) The beginning third was actually a very slick and consistently amusing puzzle. Sadly, when Mike Tyson showed up, it took a turn for the worst. As is often the case, unfortunately. It had nothing to do with Tyson, who was arguably the funniest part of the film. “It’s my favorite part!  Ba-da-ba-da-da-doom!”  It was the tiger that started it. From the moment totally ripped out of Tommy Boy and countless other movies on, there are rarely laughs to be had, and the last half of the movie is agonizingly predictable, shallow, and just plain stupid.

I do agree with Todd that the movie rips off a lot of its best material.  But instead of going with Tommy Boy as its main source of comedy, I’d go with Seinfeld.  Examples: Galifianakis wearing a man-purse (like when Jerry wears one in the “fur coat” episode), the whole anti-Dentist bent the movie takes (“You’re an Anti-Dentite!”), and the semi-obligatory sports celebrity extended cameo (SOSCEC) begun with Keith Hernandez’s Seinfeld appearance.

The actors do a good job here. Justin Bartha is very funny, except for the fact that he is only in maybe 25 minutes total. He’s the straight man. I didn’t find him terribly funny except his sunburn. Bradley Cooper is good in his part, but it could have been played by almost any slick-looking actor in Hollywood. Ed Helms steals the movie. It’s odd that the movie sets him up as a dentist, and yet he never mentions how losing his tooth will impede his reputation as a good dentist. Heather Graham is always great to see, but her character was underused and underdeveloped. It was Heather Graham, meaning we got to see her boobs again. Zach Gilifianakis, with the exception of a cool Rain Man part, almost single-handedly ruins the movie with his tired dumbass routine that is in every movie. Admittedly, the Rain Man rip-off was a bit amateurish.  But the dude is funny in that sort of John-Belushi-the-fewer-words-spoken-the-funnier kind of way.  Ken Jeong, who peaked with Knocked Up, is simply irritating and ruins every scene he is in. As a good Asian friend of mine once told me, “You put in an Asian man into any movie, and it automatically gets funnier.”

Side note: I like that these are B-level actors.  None of them are terribly recognizable, which makes their scenes all the more refreshing.  Imagine how much this movie would have sucked with Galifianakis, Cooper, and Helms replaced by Jack Black, Ben Affleck, and Mike Meyers. Suck-ola.

The real problem with this movie is that it had no idea what it wanted to be. It is a smart comedy for a little while, but then it turns sour when it starts to get just silly. Every moment in the second half of the movie is borrowed from somewhere else. I saw quite a bit of Pineapple Express in the movie, which is a movie with similar flaws, but which had already established that sort of feel prior to unleashing the dumb comedy all over the second half. Yeah, James Franco would have made a better roofie dealer than Black Doug. The Hangover struggles with its identity. It could have been treated as a smooth comedy, like the first part. It could have been an all out raunchy bash, like the night we don’t get to see probably was. Actually, the movie isn’t all that raunchy.  No nudity, and Galifianakis never even swears – something I appreciated in this era when we are expected to laugh for some reason when a character unexpectedly mutters “fuck” (see James Taylor in Funny People.)  Or it could have been a stupid attempt at humor, like the second half. Any of those would have been fine, if it had stuck with it throughout, accomplishing some sort of a guilty pleasure at least. It tries to combine all three, and it fails miserably. It is like Step Brothers meets Old School meets Dude, Where’s My Car? All films significantly better than The Hangover, right? If any of those appealed to you, then definitely check out this movie. You will love it.

Again, I think Todd has a point. It was uneven at times, and borrows too much. But it was entertaining, I can’t deny that. I remembered the characters’ names and personalities afterwards.  I remembered stupid scenes like the guys getting tased by officers in front of a classroom, or the tiger sticking its paw through the window, or and the hilariously vulgar wedding singer at the end of the film.  I remember all those things because they were amusing – maybe not hilarious, but more fun to watch than the majority of crap released these days.  I like how bold and vulgar the movie is, and how it doesn’t cheapen the humor by making it less crude in order to garner a more family-friendly audience.

Overall, the movie is just frustrating. When a gang crashes into the stolen cop car that they are driving and tries to kill them in front of the wedding chapel and shoots a guy with no repercussions, I shook my head and thought, “Come on, you don’t need to go there.” If Nicolas Cage had done it, would you be saying the same thing? Then they went there, over and over again. I suppose I can call it a semi-fun experience that never seems real. There is not a shred of originality or realism in the entire movie, expect for maybe the first 15 minutes, when the anticipation and possibilities were still in front of the film. I thoroughly agree with the last two sentences.  Then it reduces itself to stupid gags, lame dialogue, annoying characters, and events as ridiculous as the Elvis impersonators sky-diving in Honeymoon in Vegas, but nowhere near as funny. Nor is it as funny as Phil Donahue throwing up into a tuba. The end credits show the photos that put everything that we didn’t see in perspective, and it probably brought as much surprise and smiles than the previous 90 minutes combined. Movies are getting better and better at ensuring their audiences will stay through the closing credits.  I know that there are many people that will love this and hail it as the next in line of the sex comedy genre that Apatow has redefined. But really, this is as dim-witted as any movie, but it thinks that it is smart. That’s a bad combination. I don’t think The Hangover believes itself to be a smart comedy.  Critics have posited that label on it – just like they did with the equally dim-witted Borat.  People need to believe that there’s more of a reason that this movie grossed the money it did – something more than that it’s stupid or vulgar.  But that’s precisely what it is.  Winning the Golden Globe for Best Comedy is absurd.  Making the kind of money it made is not particularly surprising.  It’s fun, not overlong, not indulgent, and likable.

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