‘The Hangover’ Review

Release Date: 6/5/09

The Hangover, directed by Todd Phillips (Old School) and written by Jon Lucas and Scott Moore (Four Christmases) is a ridiculous but hilarious comedy set in Las Vegas.  Todd Phillips delivers his best comedy since Old School with this very funny story of three friends who retrace their steps from a drunken bachelor party.  It has the feeling of Dude, Where’s My Car except for one thing, this movie is actually funny.  It’s one ridiculous thing after another as these guys try to remember what they did the night before.  Anyone who has had a nice drunken night in their life and likes to party, then you can relate to this and really have a great time in the theater.

Two days before he ties the knot with his fiancée, easygoing Doug (Justin Bartha) takes off for a brief Las Vegas bachelor party with three groomsmen: His two best buddies — Phil (Bradley Cooper), a wise ass high school teacher, and Stu (Ed Helms), a dentist usually kept on a tight leash by his nagging girlfriend and Alan (Zach Galifianakis), Doug’s future brother-in-law, who is fat, bearded, slightly retarded, and who’s all too eager to add these guys to his wolf pack. The bachelor-partiers enjoy a wild night of booze-fueled festivities in Sin City. The next morning, however, three of them awaken in their hotel suite with only the haziest of memories about the previous evening’s events, and no explanation at all for the snarling tiger in their bathroom and the crying baby in their closet.

Zach Galifianakis is fucking hilarious as Alan.  Carrying a baby on his chest, acting like Rain Man, asking the most ridiculous questions about Caesars Palace, he really does steal the show and will probably end up as everyone’s favorite character. Galifianakis has finally made a feature film that will most certainly get him noticed.  He reminded me a little of Will Ferrell’s character from Old School.  Bradley Cooper as Phil was a pretty cool dude, he makes fun of people most of the time and can really deliver a one-liner.  Ed Helms is great as Stu.  If you are a fan of Andy Bernard from The Office then you will definitely enjoy his character, he even breaks out with a nice little tiger song on the piano like his usual melodies on The Office.  There are also some decent cameos by Jeffrey Tambor, Ken Jeong, Heather Graham, Mike Epps, Todd Phillips himself and Mike Tyson.

Like Mike Tyson says, “We do some crazy things when we’re fucked up”.

The script is great.  It’s like they took the most ridiculous things they could think of that could happen to you in a night at Vegas and put it in the movie.  It only gets really ridiculous at some points.  It’s actually a pretty smart script mixing some good jokes with some really raunchy stuff.  I had an awesome time watching it and there was only a couple times where I was not laughing out loud.  It never had me crying laughing like some other comedies but it’s just such a fun movie to sit back and enjoy, even if it might be predictable as hell.  I felt like I did when I first saw Beerfest, I immediately wanted to go out and drink my face off and talk about the movie.

There have been some great endings in the past couple years for comedies.  I thought the ending of Pineapple Express was genius recapping all the funny parts of the movie.  This year I mentioned that Observe and Report had one of the funniest ending ever and it had me crying laughing.  Well The Hangover might beat them both because it’s just perfect.  I couldn’t think of a better way to end all the madness.  Destined to become a classic!

Who let the dogs out….who who who!

MADE!!!!

Imdb: N/A
Rotten Tomatoes: N/A
Moviewiseguys: 8.5/10