Film Review: Bachelor party goes way bad in 'The Hangover'

Photo by Frank Masi/Warner Bros. Pictures, Frank Masi/Warner Bros. Pictures

After a wild bachelor party, Zach Galifianakis (left), Bradley Cooper and Ed Helms find themselves with a missing bachelor and an unexpected baby in "The Hangover."

We might call "The Hangover" a bachelor party movie without a bachelor party.

As the title suggests, the action skips from an early-evening Jägermeister toast to the painful morning after in a destroyed Las Vegas hotel suite, where the evidence of debauchery includes a live chicken, a missing tooth, loss of memory, an Elvis jumpsuit, Mike Tyson's Bengal tiger, an unidentified baby and the absence of the bachelor himself. "Things got out of control," one character observes, in one of the movie's few examples of understatement.

Photo by Frank Masi/Warner Bros. Pictures

After a wild bachelor party, Zach Galifianakis (left), Bradley Cooper and Ed Helms find themselves with a missing bachelor and an unexpected baby in "The Hangover."

Sometimes tasteless, frequently hilarious, "The Hangover" should be the sleeper hit of the summer. Like "Superbad" but with grownups (co-star Ed Helms even resembles an adult "McLovin"), the film chronicles several hours of irresponsible, sometimes criminal male behavior; nothing new about that, but the relatively novel ensemble cast (for the most part, these are not the same old friends-of-Apatow-and- Ferrell faces) and the surprise of the story -- the film is structured as a mystery, as the friends piece together clues to locate the missing bachelor -- keep the film fresh.

Justin Bartha plays Doug, the bachelor, taken to Vegas by his two best friends (and his possibly demented cousin) for a road-trip overnight bachelor party that is described as simply a "speed bump" on the road to happiness.

The friends include the unmarried yet henpecked Stu (Helms) and the handsome and cool Phil (Bradley Cooper). The cousin is played by outré standup comic Zach Galifianakis, crowned "one of the great new hopes of American comedy" in a lengthy story in this past Sunday's New York Times Magazine. Bearded and stout, in "The Hangover" he looks like Sam Phillips, the late founder of Sun Records; and like Phillips, he seems to exist on his own plane of reality. He is deadpan and sometimes even scary, and some viewers may find themselves too much on edge to laugh during a lengthy middle section of the film when he's put in charge of a baby.

Occasionally, the film (directed by Todd Phillips, best known for "Old School") strains at outrageousness. When a tiger that belongs to boxer Mike Tyson winds up in a hotel bathroom, hey, I can buy that; but when Tyson himself leads the cast in a group sing-along to "In the Air Tonight" by Phil Collins, it seems like a calculated attempt to create a "classic" viral YouTube moment.

If there's anything troubling about "The Hangover" (and other films of its ilk), it's the at best ambivalent, at worst hostile relationship to women. This is another film in which men's infantile behavior is celebrated as a necessary, sanity-preserving reaction against the choking if essential civilizing influence of women. The film takes unconvincing pains to show that marriage can be a good thing, but the relationship that is emphasized throughout the story is that of Stu and his emasculating girlfriend (Rachael Harris), who is presented as a much less appealing mate than a kindhearted prostitute (Heather Graham).

-- John Beifuss: 529-2394

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