The Hangover

dir: Todd Phillips

2009

This flick, being a comedy, being set in Vegas, is by its nature the laziest goddamn movie you could possibly imagine. Studios love setting comedies in Vegas because all the work is already done for them. They don’t have to think up anything creative, new or original, at all.

I mean, why would you want to? Thinking is just sooooo tiring. It smacks of effort.

If you haven’t seen this, even you can probably guess most of the settings and most of the things that happen, without watching it. Try it out, see how you go. Maybe your version will be slightly more interesting than the actual version.

It was massively successful though, so what the hell do I know. This movie spoke to millions of people. Presumably males, but millions of them all the same.

Really, though, I’m struggling to remember anything that was funny about it at all. There’s scene after scene that approaches perhaps the level of being amusing, and then fades away before satisfying even basic needs.

But then, it is exactly what it claims to be. It never pretended to be anything more than a lowbrow comedy centring around a bachelor party in Las Vegas, where a bunch of dicks act dickish and try to get back to their town in one piece. It’s pretty much an American rite of passage, right up there with losing your virginity and shooting a gun for the first time, preferably at the same time.

The truly original part of this story is that it’s about a bunch of guys who end up having a crazy Bachelor Party kind of night, but they can’t remember it and they lose the groom, in a Dude, Where’s My Car kind of fashion. So they have to follow a trail of vomited-on bread crumbs to find their stuff and the groom, who, for all they know, has been sold into white slavery and is now the chattel of some odious sheik. Dance, pretty white boy, he’ll say, dance for me or it’s the chop for you.

The main characters have barely singular traits to differentiate themselves from each other apart from their appearance: there’s the Jock one (Bradley Cooper), the Nerdy, Henpecked one (Ed Helms), the Weird one (Zach Galifianakis) and the Groom (Justin Bartha), who disappears for most of the movie. Lucky him.

Even those traits don’t even really register in any more than an abstract fashion. Really, to me they became, in the same order: Orange skinned douchebag, Glasses guy missing a tooth, and Guy with Beard. Of course I’ve seen these shmucks in plenty of other things, but really, this is the easiest paycheck they’ve ever picked up.

Sure, Vegas, not much of a stretch required thinking up shit for them to do. But someone adds what we in Australia call rohypnol to the mix, which they call roofies in the States. The accidental consumption of this so-called ‘date rape’ drug results in persistent blackouts for the lead chaps, who can’t remember what occurred last night, or how things ended up in their various states of disarray.

Those “things” involve a tiger and a baby, both of which somehow end up in their hotel suite. From there they are left with piecing together the details of their night from receipts, ticket stubs and other scraps in their pockets, and, in many cases, surveillance footage confirming what they did and where they went.

Because they don’t remember anything, each revelation of what dark deeds transpired the previous night is meant to be as hilarious to us as it is horrifying to them. On the most part, practically nothing that happens to them is that surprising, to us or to them. Bradley Cooper, who swans about with an infuriating air of fratboy arrogance, is above everything that happens, and perhaps is ideally suited for this role. Whether he’s apologising to Mike Tyson for trying to have sex with his tiger, or screaming abuse/apologies at a strange, very gay Triad gangster (Ken Jeong, who is currently as ubiquitous as he is unfunny), he maintains the constant “I’m better than this material, and will be hanging out with George Clooney and supermodels in no time” above-it-all persona eternally.

He is what typifies the biggest problem I had with the flick: none of the characters were likeable, and I didn’t really care if they lived or died, or if they found their friend, or if they all died in a fiery nuclear apocalypse akin to the end of The Stand. Galifianakis, who I’ve seen doing stand-up and liked a lot, is pretty painful, but he’s such an underwritten character. To me it’s clear that much of the dialogue is being improvised on the spot, which means there are multiple other versions of each scene that were actually worse than the ones that make it to screen.

It’s a terrifying notion.

Such a piece of information is staggering to me. If there is one of them that actually is funny, the closest is probably Zach, but even then he’s usually more odd than funny.

Ed Helms, who I only know from the work he used to do on The Daily Show, which, considering the groupthink over there, meant he was consistently pretty obnoxious in that pseudo gung-ho Rob Corddry / Jason Jones / John Oliver / Rob Wriggle annoying way they have/had of delivering their pseudo interviews or pieces to camera. He’s reasonably amusing as the uptight guy on the trip to Vegas who flips out the most and does the ‘craziest’ stuff.

In this case, ‘crazy’ involves ripping one of his own teeth out and marrying a stripper / working girl played by Heather Graham, who, for the third time, plays the cleanest-looking working girl in cinematic history. As the under-the-thumb member of the crew, he also has to face the fury of his uptight girlfriend, who, more than anything else, represents one of the ways in which this flick manages to be deeply misogynistic. Perhaps it’s an essential element of any Vegas story that women are either sex objects to be rubbed up against or screaming shrew harridans. So, take your pick: blow-up dolls or harpies. What would I know anyway, since I’ve never been to Vegas: The City of Neon, STDs and the Death of Hope.

Still, even though I’ve never ventured to the place, it is a location that I have found intriguing for a long time. It probably stems from the obligatory reading of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas that occurs when you go to university for the first time (at least, back in my day it came in the hipster induction douchebag package along with copies of Camus’s The Outsider, Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead, some incense, a scented candle, a stupid hat and a Che Guevara t-shirt). So many of the details around Vegas’ creation and continued existence are fascinating to me, far more so than the role it plays in giving idiots of all ages somewhere to go in order to act like idiots on holiday.

Of course I wasn’t expecting ethnographic cultural examination or sociological deconstruction in a flick like this, which, considering how much money it made, and how it will doubtless spawn countless sequels and rip-offs (despite being a wholly unoriginal flick constructed from a tonne of other flicks itself), got its balance of the familiar and the bawdy right. I just found it so fucking familiar and lazy.

Director Todd Phillips specialises in these very bland comedies in name only, so I can’t really say I’m a fan of his work. This, Road Trip, Old School, Starsky and Hutch et al all represent the triumph of mediocrity that Ayn Rand spent so much of her life trying to defend us from. And yet her clarion call to the ages still goes unheeded.

But again, who am I to judge when the masses have so unanimously spoken in favour of this flick? It doesn’t really have to do that much, I guess, because the image alone of a bearded weirdo carrying a baby is pretty funny, as is the thought of Mike Tyson atonally braying to In The Air Tonight by Phil Collins (as opposed to the reality), or a tiger in someone’s bathroom, or an obvious sexual predator like Bradley Cooper being a teacher, or marrying a stripper in a chapel; any one of those things surely is funny enough to justify a whole film.

All of them together? That’s comedy fucking gold, that is.

5 times most of the leads were acting like they were in different films much of the time out of 10

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“Doc, none of us could remember anything from last night. Remember?” – wish I could say the same, The Hangover.