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There's something undeniably great about Todd Phillips' latest slice of laddish largesse. The plot synopsis alone, four guys head out ...
There's something undeniably great about Todd Phillips' latest slice of laddish largesse. The plot synopsis alone, four guys head out to Vegas for the mother of all stag nights, instils a simple, unadulterated sense of joy. You know exactly what you're getting with this comedy yet it's guaranteed to win you over all the same. We've all been there! Three best friends and a tagalong nutjob of a brother-in-law retreat to Vegas for one last night of debauchery and scandal. What most people only talk about, these guys actually do. Only problem is when they awake the next morning, none of them can remember what happened to them and the bridegroom is missing! Essentially "The Hangover" is a sketch or pub joke made flesh, stretched over 90 minutes and enlivened with some of the best comedy characters of the last five years! It may seem slight but where else can you find three hapless and hungover guys tame a tiger, adopt a baby, scrap with a naked Triad and jam to Phil Collins with 'Iron' Mike Tyson. Phillips certainly knows how to assemble a cast. His previous effort, "Old School", combined the erstwhile talents of Luke Wilson, Vince Vaughan and Will Ferrell to brilliant effect and here in "The Hangover" he's done it again. Justin Bartha, essentially the straight guy foil for the rest of the team, plays Doug - the groom to be and soon to be AWOL best mate and victim to one of the most bonkers crazy stags ever conceived. The in-demand Bradley Cooper as Phil is the Alpha Male of the bunch and finds himself lumbered with piecing together the events of the previous night. Ed Helms (from the US equivalent of "The Office") gets a little typecast as the tightly wound dentist Stu and stand up comic Zach Galifianakis brings the Crazy as Alan, Doug's socially awkward brother-in-law. There's even room enough for Heather Graham to make a welcome appearance - as if letting us in on Rollergirl's later years as a single mom! "The Hangover", much like a disparate group of lads, relies almost entirely on the energies of its leads and thankfully for Phillips all four of the guys here are on career-making / career best form. Cooper pulls off the go-to-guy shtick effortlessly and Galifianakis, a relative unknown on these shores, is just plain fun to watch with his full on facial fuzz and jockstrap combo. Arguably the stand up makes the film, and his performance is not unlike that of John Belushi's legendary turn in "Animal House". Like Alan, "The Hangover" is simple fare yet charming and endlessly rewarding!
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Press Association
"We lost Doug, we can't find Doug..." mumbles a bloodied and bruised man into his mobile 'phone, sweating profusely in ...
"We lost Doug, we can't find Doug..." mumbles a bloodied and bruised man into his mobile 'phone, sweating profusely in the rippling heat of the Nevada desert. "What are you saying? We're getting married in five hours!" shrieks Doug's understandably alarmed bride-to-be. "Yeah. That's not going to happen..." So begins The Hangover, a rowdy, bawdy and sporadically amusing buddy comedy about three best men who 'misplace' the groom during a stag weekend in Vegas, and hazily retrace their alcohol-fuelled steps to find their missing friend. Jon Lucas and Scott Moore's scattershot screenplay reads like the result of a drunken brainstorming session, peppered with bizarre, disparate interludes including a tangle with a stolen tiger, a shotgun wedding, the DIY extraction of a tooth and Mike Tyson singing Phil Collins' "In The Air Tonight". Gags predominantly miss rather than hit the mark but the randomness of the narrative and the sparkling rapport between the leading cast ensure at least one or two belly laughs amidst the lunacy and vomiting. The three leads appear to be having a ball: reverse angle shots clearly show them corpsing at each other's outlandish antics. It's a shame their hilarity isn't infectious. Humour is pitched towards the puerile: grown men using 'gay' as an insult or dry-humping one another. Boys will be boys, even in their thirties it would seem. Two days before he walks down the aisle with his beautiful bride Tracy (Sasha Barrese), Doug (Justin Bartha) heads for the bright lights of the desert strip with his best buddies Phil (Bradley Cooper) and Stu (Ed Helms) and eccentric, future brother-in-law, Alan (Zach Galifianakis). Tracy is understandably nervous about a bachelor party so close to the wedding but her father (Jeffrey Tambor) understands that it is an important rite of passage. "What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas, except herpes. That will come back with you," he confides sagely. Upon arrival at the luxurious Caesars Palace hotel, the four men upgrade to a plush suite and head out to paint the town red, blue, green and all the colours of the rainbow. Several hours of heavy drinking and wild partying ensue and in the morning, Phil, Stu and Alan wake with pounding headaches and no memory of the previous night's antics. A trashed hotel suite and the presence of a baby in a closet are the first signs that something is dreadfully awry; the absence of the groom-to-be comes a very close second. As the three men stumble upon people who remember them from the night before, including a stripper called Jade (Heather Graham) and the mysterious Mr Chow (Ken Jeong), they begin to understand quite how much trouble they are in and how unlikely it is that Doug will be at the altar to say, "I do". Directed by Todd Phillips, whose previous male bonding exercises include Road Trip and Old School, The Hangover is a mish mash of ideas, which never gel. If there is a method to screenwriters Lucas and Moore's madness, it remains hidden until the end credits when snapshots reveal what happened in Vegas in lurid detail. The three leads sweat blood and tears, literally, to wring out every last chortle from the set-ups. Galifianakis snaffles most of the giggles with his idiot savant's random outbursts: "Tigers love pepper, they hate cinnamon." Stu's romantic subplot is undernourished, lessening the impact of the final showdown with his adulterous, harridan girlfriend (Rachael Harris). Sometimes love means saying, "I don't".
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