C
Slob comedy is currently in fashion, courtesy of the Apatow factory, and Todd Phillips certainly offers a heaping helping of it in this coarse but only intermittently amusing example of boys’ night out. “The Hangover” is about a Las Vegas bachelor party that goes awry in ways that resemble a John Hughes script taken out of high school and raised to an extreme. It winds up making hay out of the same sort of unintended consequences that Homer and his uptight neighbor faced when they went off to Sin City on the old “Simpsons” episode “Viva Ned Flanders.” The difference is that the half-hour cartoon was funnier.
The groom-to-be is Doug (Justin Bartha), a nice fellow about to tie the knot with Tracy (Sasha Barrese), whose rich father Sid (Jeffrey Tambor) is not only understanding about his prospective son-in-law’s need to break loose before the ceremony but loans him his prize car to drive to Vegas. Doug’s two best friends go with him—Phil (Bradley Cooper), a wise-ass high school teacher, and Stu (Ed Helms), a milquetoast dentist who’s not married but is nonetheless henpecked by his harridan girlfriend Melissa (Rachel Harris), whom he tells they’re actually going to the Sonoma wine country for a genteel tour. Filling out the quartet is Tracy’s doofus, eager-to-be-liked brother Alan (Zach Galifianakis), who’s supposed to be kept away from both the steering wheel and the tables, since he’s got a gambling problem to go with his general clueless ineptitude.
The guys check into a palatial suite and proceed to get blotto, thanks to Alan’s spiking their booze, and the next morning he, Phil and Stu awaken, totally wasted, to find Doug missing, their hotel room trashed, and a couple of unusual additions to it—a tiger in the bathroom and a baby in the kitchen. And when they retrieve their ride from the valet, they discover it’s been transformed into a police car.
The bulk of “The Hangover” is devoted to the guys’ attempt to find Doug and get him back to California in time for the wedding, which necessarily involves an attempt to unravel the adventures of the previous night. It turns out to be a very complicated chain of events, of course, involving Jade (Heather Graham), a sprightly stripper; Mr. Chow (Ken Jeong), a caricature oriental bigwig; a drug dealer also named Doug (Mike Epps); a goofy cop (Rob Riggle); and, playing himself, Mike Tyson.
What the script by Jon Lucas and Scott Moore offers is about equal doses of grossness and physical slapstick, sometimes quite violent, with only a rare stab at sweetness. It’s an improvement on their previous work (the awful “Four Christmases” and “Ghosts of Girlfriends Past”), but just marginally. And when at the end they try for a big “get me to the church on time” ending to rival “The In-Laws” (the original, of course, not the wretched remake), they fall far short of the model.
Phillips keeps the action moving along reasonably well, but his cast isn’t sufficiently distinctive to lift the material above the mundane. Bartha’s a total cipher, and Cooper, the blander-than-bland actor who’s been popping up with inexplicable regularity in Hollywood comedies of late, tries but fails to sell himself as a sarcastic mover-and-shaker. Helms, from “The Office,” does the harried boyfriend bit well enough, but together the trio can’t persuade us that these guys would ever have been best buddies for years; they strike you as men who would have avoided one another instead. Galifianakis is obviously supposed to be the sparkplug in the ensemble, as he is to the plot, but he seems a size too small for Alan; the part feels as though it was written for Jack Black and then farmed out when he proved unavailable or unwilling. But if he—and the others—fail to build built up the kind of rapport that Seth Rogen and James Franco did as the leads in “Pineapple Express” (a movie with a similar mix of action and raunchiness), you at least have you be thankful that in general they don’t just mug it up.
In support Tambor is in full smarmy mode and Epps is restrained—for him—while Jeong, perhaps to balance the equation, takes swishiness and stereotyping to almost unimaginable lengths. Tyson makes the most of his cameo, coming across as a nice fellow if no great actor. Among the women in what’s very much a male showpiece, Graham is engaging, Harris convincingly awful, and Barrese as much a cipher as her husband-to-be (they should do well together). Production values are solid if unspectacular.
Among guy flicks this one comes in around the middle, neither unmentionably terrible nor particularly memorable. At the close the quartet of friends find a camera that finally reveals what happened to them the previous night—the stills, some nastier than anything in the movie itself, are shown during the final credits—and they agree to look at the pictures just once before deleting them. “The Hangover” is the kind of middle-grade picture that doesn’t invite a second viewing itself. At the same time it doesn’t deserve to be utterly wiped out. If that sort of mediocrity is enough for you, drink up.