Spoiled Reviews

According to “The Hangover,” the dull, derivative and dumb new Apatow-wannabe from director Todd Phillips, physical pain is funny (and safe and enjoyable!). Gay men are funny, Asian men are funny; gay Asian men are double funny. Women are funny, but only because they’ve got two settings (perfect/bitch), both of which are funny. And a bachelor party is both the pinnacle of a young man’s existence, and really, really funny.

So it is for the four men tripping to Las Vegas with their friend Doug (Justin Bartha), who’s about to tie the knot. They arrive in a beautiful Mercedes that we know will (and does) get beat to pieces by film’s end, to have the rowdiest night of Doug’s life. Scene: the friends start off on the roof of a Vegas hotel with shots of Jagermeister. Fade to black. Cut to Stu’s (Ed Helms) battered, newly gap-toothed face pressed to the floor of their Vegas suite the next morning. The men awake to find their villa in ruins, a tiger in the bathroom, a baby in the closet and Doug missing. The catch is, none of them can remember any events from the night before, due to some roofie slippage.

The rest of the film follows Stu, Phil (Bradley Cooper) and Alan (Zach Galifianakis) as they try to piece together the events of the night before, and find Doug so he can marry his harpy. Their investigation reveals that their escapades included the following, in no particular order, since much like Vegas, the film seems to have no chronology (or sense of shame):

Item, hookers are enjoyed; item, a hooker is quickie-wed; item, a mattress is thrown from the hotel window, or so they assume; item, Mike Tyson’s tiger is stolen; item, $80,000 mysteriously disappears from a tiny, gay, Asian man; item, said tiny gay, Asian man is locked in a car trunk; item, a police car is stolen; item, the Mercedes is parked in the middle of Las Vegas Avenue. And so on.

Miraculously, and thanks to the magical healing powers of bromance cinema, no one is hurt in all of these snafus, and the mystery of the missing Doug is finally solved. (Here’s where the spoils happen, beware.) Remember the mattress? Suddenly, so do the friends, who realize Vegas hotel room windows don’t open. They also suddenly remember how much they used to enjoy dragging teenage Doug’s sleeping bag into the middle of the woods when they were camping. They rush to the roof to find a slightly sunburnt, but safe and sound Doug, who has thrown his mattress from the roof to signal his plight. The friends have just enough time to speed back to LA to get Doug hitched.

There’s nothing new going on in this movie, and really nothing that the Apatow/Rogen crew hasn’t already tackled, and better, and more exhaustively. Some of “The Hangover” is distasteful, but most of it is just uninteresting, and almost none of it is really funny. The one exception is Zach Galifianakis, who plays Alan, a man-child whom the friends finally realize is sweeter than he is distasteful. Almost everything Galifianakis does is weird and stilted and just offbeat enough to get a laugh. Turns out it was he who did the roofie-ing, thinking the little pills were ecstasy, and sincerely wanting his friends to have a good time. He composes lame poetry, counts cards at a blackjack table, names the baby from the closet Carlos, and generally flops around good naturedly, stealing every scene and making the film, if not wholly funny, at least bearable. Too bad about the rest of the plot.

-Cecilia Razak