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Todd Phillips
July 2, 2009
Doug (Justin Bartha) travels to Las Vegas with three buddies (Bradley Cooper, Ed Helms, and Zach Galifianakis) for a crazy and exciting stag party two days before his wedding. The three groomsmen have no memory of anything when they wake up the following morning and are unable to locate Doug. To get Doug back to Los Angeles in time for the wedding, the three disoriented friends scramble to retrace their tracks and find him with little time to spare.
With “Old School” and “Road Trip,” director Todd Phillips has previously shown that he is aware of what occurs between men when they are allowed to be, well, men. Thanks in large part to Phillips’ refusal to compel a melancholy final act and the delightfully perverse and subversive chemistry between the three major actors, Phillips and his ensemble in “The Hangover” transcend the subject matter that once seemed expected.
Zach Galifianakis’ performance as Alan, who alternates between perversity and sweetness with such ease that you can’t help but fall in love with this socially awkward oaf of a man-child, is by far the film’s best. Galifianakis makes Alan the most emotionally complicated of the males while also providing the most of the movie’s hilarious moments.
While “The Hangover” mostly follows this tried-and-true formula, it does so in a hilarious way with absurd situations like Stu’s shotgun marriage to a Vegas stripper, a tiger stolen from the home of former heavyweight champion Mike Tyson, a vengeful Chinese mobster, and the practically mandatory scenes in a Vegas wedding chapel and, of course, a police station. In other words… “what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.”
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