The Hangover **** (2009, Bradley Cooper, Zach Galifianakis, Ed Helms, Justin Bartha) – Classic Movie Review 978

Not sure quite what to say about this hysterical, in-your-face 2009 comedy from Todd Phillips, the writer/director of Road Trip, Old School and Starsky & Hutch. It’ll probably make more friends than it will enemies, so let’s try to tread carefully. It’s everybody’s favourite bad-taste farce. It won the 2010 Golden Globe for Best Motion Picture, Comedy or Musical.

First the plot, that’s easy enough. It’s a clone of the 1998 Jon Favreau movie, Very Bad Things. Bradley Cooper, Zach Galifianakis, Ed Helms and Justin Bartha play four unattractive, ageing idiots who should know better, who head for Las Vegas for a 24-hour stag party to celebrate Doug’s up-coming wedding to Tracy (Sasha Barrese).

Three of these awful representatives of arrested development manhood wake up next morning in their hotel suite with three of the worst hangovers in history, and wondering what the heck happened the night before. They have lost one of their buddies, the about-to-be-married Doug (Justin Bartha), which might seem like a good thing. Although, to be fair, Bartha is the most appealing of the bunch.

With aggressively charmless performances from a charisma-free band of ‘funny-men’, this is a train wreck of a movie, filthy, unfunny, racist, sexist and homophobic. The annoying fat one, Zach Galifianakis, playing Tracy’s brother Alan, is by far the worst of the group, while Bradley Cooper, playing married high school teacher stud Phil, infuriatingly smirks for America as he tries to deliver a funny line and Ed Helms as Stu, the hopeless dork of a dentist, seems a bit of an acquired taste. What happened to comedians being loveable?

Worse still, the lovely, sweet Heather Graham (playing a prostitute called Jade) is abused by Jon Lucas and Scott Moore’s screenplay, which thinks all women are shrews or tarts and that all men are either desperate for sex or effeminate. On that front, Ken Jeong’s Mr Chow is a particularly dodgy, ghastly creation. Indeed, the film’s best performance comes from Mike Tyson (playing, er, Mike Tyson) – only kidding!

All that said, the movie motors on its supreme, stop-at-nothing confidence, self-belief and motor-mouth attack, and it’s got mountains of them. And we have to admit that there are lots of inventively funny situations in Lucas and Moore’s script and that the live tiger in the bathroom and abandoned baby in the closet give rise to some gut-bustingly hysterical moments.

So, if you’re a fan of stop-at-nothing, after-the-pub laddish comedy, there are loads and loads of big, dirty and probably hilarious jokes all the way through.

The American Film Institute went mad and made it 2010 Film of the Year. They said: ‘The Hangover will have you rubbing your head in the morning and wishing you hadn’t had so much fun. Director Todd Phillips and screenwriters Jon Lucas and Scott Moore have created an anthem to arrested male adolescence that is unashamed, unapologetic and unbelievably funny. The Hangover brought laughter to a world when it needed it most and deserves a toast for its mastery of the comedic form, one of film-making’s most challenging feats.’

Two sequels of diminishing quality followed in 2011 and 2013.

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