The Hangover

Review By: Jon Allen
JonAllen@TheCinemaSource.com

Todd Phillips has made a career of documenting his characters, as seen in the beginning of his career: Hated, a glimpse into the mind and intensity of the controversial and self-mutilating G.G. Allin, a hardcore punk icon and performance artist who provided Phillips an entry into the canon of post-grad documentary films. He followed his debut with another documentary, about the porn industry, Screw: Al Goldstein’s Kingdom of Porn. Even in his fictional work, his characters are hampered by desire and a kind of teenage ambition that is blind to the world and doesn’t care about the consequences of messing up and having to start over, even if it sacrifices some of their dignity and humanity for the sake of their hilarious conquest.

When his first non-documentary entry took shape in the form of Road Trip, the ultimate “college rules” comedy in 2000, its success could have been attributed to the fact that its arrival paralleled so many teen-oriented comedies that hit theaters before and after the millennium. But while the film follows of trend of sexual depravity and takes pleasure in the ever expanding number of suburban offspring trapped in perpetual and puerile innocence -- taking shelter in all parts of America and trying to figure out exactly what’s going on -- it also demonstrated that Phillips could accentuate life-long adolescence and capture great comic timing from his actors. Road Trip formally introduced Phillips as a junk-culture loving fanatic to a larger viewing public.

Old School arrived two years later and cemented his reputation -- and Will Ferrell’s -- as a revealing look at grown men stuck in suburban homogeny, able to transmute from willing husband and father to sex and alcohol consumed man-children. It’s a style that probably should develop but also smartly remains true to Phillips’s uncanny ability to exploit something from his characters that plays into his brand of screwball comedy so effectively, or at least in tune with the nature of his plot devices.

With The Hangover, everyone grows up a little bit, or at least at the end, and only when it matters most. Perfectly in tune with the title, our cast has to recover from a night they’ll never forget and prepare for one of the more sobering events they could stumble into: a wedding that brings together a waiting-in-vain bride and a bewildered and ego-damaged groom.

Phil (Bradley Cooper) and Stu (Ed Helms) are best friends attending the wedding of their other best friend Doug (Justin Bartha). All that stands between them and that relatively important and life-altering event are two days and a free-spirited trip to Las Vegas. Doug invites his future brother-in-law (a sorely underused Zach Galifiankis), and the four head over the border and into a fantasy land that only cinema’s interpretation of Vegas could merit. When they get there, they are reminded why their lives almost depended on this weekend away, because the city of vice and seeming corruption is a fantasy that seems so ...