Current picture shows: The Hangover

June 11, 10:42 PMBurlington Movie ExaminerLuke Baynes

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“I feel sorry for people who don’t drink.  When they wake up in the morning that’s as good as they’re going to feel all day.”  - Frank Sinatra

When Ol’ Blue Eyes uttered that quote, I’m guessing it wasn’t at seven in the morning, and I have a feeling he wasn’t in quite as bad a state as the characters in the new Todd Phillips movie.

The Hangover is about four guys from Cali who hit the Vegas strip for a bachelor party.  Doug (Justin Bartha) is the groom-to-be getting one last gasp of bachelorhood.  Phil (Bradley Cooper) is a pretty boy grade school teacher with a wife and kid.  Stu (Ed Helms) is a nerdy dentist with a possessive girlfriend.  And then there’s Alan (Zach Galifianakis), brother of the bride, a pudgy, bearded, spaced-out troll of a man who’s a few cards short of a full deck.

This motley crew checks into a $4200 a night suite at Caesars Palace, heads up to the hotel roof for Jäger shots – preceded by a long, rambling non sequitur of a speech by Alan – then the scene dissolves and it’s morning.  Cut to the hotel suite where they awaken to a hangover and a completely trashed room, with a live chicken running around, a chair still belching smoke, and a baby in the room safe.  Doug is missing, although no one knows why.

If you’ve ever had a hangover – a really bad hangover – you’ll know the pain they’re feeling.   It’s the kind of hangover where your head feels like a rotted out pumpkin, where to turn the other way on the pillow immediately makes the room start to spin, where the thought of any form of food makes you want to vomit, where it takes you ten minutes to put a shirt on.  What makes it worse is they can’t remember a thing from the night before.

It’s a brilliant narrative device because it allows screenwriters Jon Lucas and Scott Moore to have free reign to concoct any possible scenario, no matter how ridiculous, without having to worry about expository action.  The plot, if you can call it that, consists of attempts to piece together the previous night’s debauchery for clues of Doug’s whereabouts, but it’s really just an excuse for a series of hilarious comic sketches.

Somehow they managed to impale a mattress on a rooftop statue, somehow Stu lost a tooth, and somehow they ended up at both a wedding chapel and a hospital in the same night.  And there’s definitely a scene involving a tiger, an air drum solo to Phil Collins’ “In the Air Tonight,” and Iron Mike Tyson, as himself.

It’s a bit like the first twenty minutes of Wedding Crashers, which was pure anarchy, dispensing with plot entirely in favor of one-liners and Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson improv.  Then the movie started and the humor became pedestrian at best.

The Hangover, a few speed bumps aside, manages to sustain a level of gleeful ribaldry for its duration.  It enters The Big Lebowski neo-noir territory in a subplot involving a Mickey Mouse gang of criminals led by a flamboyantly gay Chinese man (Ken Jeong), but Phillips doesn’t have the directorial verve to pull these sequences off.  Lacking the absurdist stylization perfected by the Coen Brothers, the scenes become just a bunch of dudes standing around talking.

Phillips and company go too far with their narrative freedom at times, with characters breaking out in kitschy song, or in an unnecessary Rain Man spoof sequence, with Alan counting cards with math formulas floating across the screen in superimposition.  It’s the type of movie where such segments could easily have been cut without any ramifications to the story, making their inclusion all the more puzzling.

The credits announce that this is a Todd Phillips Movie, and the emphasis should be placed on movie.  He doesn’t make films, or pictures, or cinema, or any term that could be construed as art.  He’s the guy responsible for such crude pieces of entertainment as Old School and Road Trip, and he’s completely unashamed of his niche. 

While I’m fairly certain we won’t be hearing about The Hangover at Cannes anytime soon, it is surely destined to find a comfortable resting place on DVDs in college dorm rooms across the country, positioned somewhere between the water bong and the 30 rack of Natty Ice.

The Hangover is currently playing at the Majestic 10 in Williston, the Roxy in Burlington, the Palace 9 in South Burlington, and Essex Cinemas in Essex Jct.
 

The trailer for The Hangover: