So I first tried to find a teenage son or daughter to bring along with me, but then I thought better of it.
"The Hangover" did look a lot like "Very Bad Things"--but they are two completely different movies. Where "Very Bad Things" is a dark comedy about the depravity of humanity (who knew Peter Berg was so deep?), "The Hangover" is a light screwball comedy that, while it does have some "shock" moments, never lets up its shiny disposition that you should have fun with it. It's a misadventure.
And, probably one that I should've encountered sometime in my life while drunkenly wandering the streets of the south side of Chicago. But somehow, by unbelievable luck--I survived without having to go through the ordeals these poor guys have to. And "The Hangover" is everybody's worst nightmare come true when you go balls out and get wasted--and in a town like Vegas, so much can happen.
So it was, from the start, a win-win situation, as long as the writers realized how much material they had to work with. I think they got it. I think there could have been more, but I think they got enough of it.
This is helped in large part to Zach Galifianakis's deadpan, strange, and off-the-wall performance where there's just so much honesty in his eyes, you can't help but laugh at everything he says and does. There are also just some laugh out loud moments in the film, some of which you feel guilty laughing about.
Overall the movie does work, but I have to gripe about a few things that didn't work for me: what was the point of the car meaning so much to the dad? It didn't add any stakes as we all are aware the car was pretty valuable--and, it was already stated in the beginning that he didn't want anybody driving it but Doug. It just seemed unnecessary for the repeated lines of "Dad is going to be so mad about the car!". Didn't add anything at all. But that's small, it didn't annoy me. The chicken. What was with the chicken? It wasn't even a funny prop. The tiger at least had a pay off and was amusing. I didn't buy the connection Stu made with ruffies having to do with where Doug was. That was weak to me.
But the biggest problem I had was the ending. Once they found Doug, that was it. There was nothing left on the table. It was a huge dip in the energy of the film, and I just felt that the whole wedding sequence was severely drawn out. And the wedding band? Um...yeah--we KINDA saw that in..."Old School"? It was eye-roll inducing to say the least. I understand they wanted to conclude stuff with Stu and his girlfriend but they could've done that in a much quicker way. We don't care enough about these characters to sit through the ceremonies. Once they had found Doug, and they were headed back to the wedding, you need to end the movie in 5 minutes or less.
Going back to the characters for a moment--while misadventures don't often allow for a lot of character development, because they wanted to treat this as sort of a buddy movie as well as a screwball comedy, it didn't work as well because the characters were very thinly drawn. It was as though they just borrowed stereotypes from other movies about bachelor parties and gave them the run-of-the-mill standard personalities. And the weird thing was, they didn't even act out accordingly a lot of the time. Because Allen (Zach) was such a strong presence, the other characters seemed to spend most of their time just trying to figure him out rather than being who they were. And Doug was a complete non-entity. We had no idea why these guys were friends to begin with. They could've used a scene or two to establish their history.
The ending credits were probably the funniest part, and that's not exactly the best time to have the biggest laughs. But I will give credit--they were hysterical.
Overall, it's a good time and it's a fun movie. Yes, obviously when you break it down, it falls a part a little bit more. But I've laid out stuff in this review that's really not even necessary--but I couldn't get it off my mind. Don't worry, I am recommending this film (yeah I know, aren't I important?!?) and I did enjoy it. But I had to call out the weaknesses.
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