After years of painstaking research, I've reached the conclusion hangovers are a capitalist plot invented to prevent us all from being drunk all the time.
It's a fact that booze makes us sexy, fun, and preternaturally skilled at operating wheeled machinery. Like a magical potion, all it takes is a few gulps to make us experts on any subject, and renders us able to shrug off all sense of pain, reason, and self-doubt. Plus it comes in colorful glass bottles like potions! Pick up a weapon, which you also become expert with while drinking, and you and your drunk friends instantly become a real-life adventuring party.
It's no wonder that up to around the start of the 20th century, everyone was pretty much smashed all the time. No way they could pull this off if they woke up feeling like burnt garbage every morning. The only conclusion is that Henry Ford, John D. Rockefeller, and Phineas Q.
Budweiser held a meeting one day, complimented each others' sideburns, and then agreed that drunk workers make for bad workers. The solution? Make it so alcohol makes you feel crummy the next day. What they could never imagine is that a hundred year later their decision would have us watching moderately good comedies like The Hangover
Justin Bartha is getting married in a couple days. In the tradition of almost-weds everywhere, he's going to Las Vegas for one last drunken night on the town thrown by friends Bradley Cooper, Ed Helms, and Zach Galifianakis.
They don't just get drunk, they get drunk. On waking, they find themselves in a wrecked hotel room with no memory of the night before--and Bartha has gone missing. They've got one day to reconstruct their lost night and track him down in time to get him back home for his wedding.
There's a whole world of comedies that are funny enough as you're watching them, but that don't exactly leave you walking out the theater thinking "Man, I can't wait to watch that again. I'm gonna go punch out my boss and tell my girlfriend she's fat so I can go see this tomorrow instead of them." If these movies were your friends, they'd be that guy you see all the time because he's buddies with one of your other friends and he's cool and all but you'd never call him to hang out with by yourself.
The Hangover is an Incidental Friend Comedy. Don't get me wrong, it's funny. I laughed a bunch, I just never laughed all that hard.
This points to a fundamental lack of what can best be described as "awesome." As written by Jon Lucas and Scott Moore, the characters aren't awesome, they're more like types: Bartha is the boring good guy, Cooper is the bad boy, Helms is the wimp so wimpy he'd lose a fight with a mug of tea, Galifianakis is the lovable but kinda creepy man-child you wouldn't leave alone with children or pets or any especially sexy pieces of furniture.
Helms and Galifianakis bring a lot to their parts, and not just because Galifianakis is the most hungover-looking man in America. Helms is a product of The Daily Show, which is basically a guarantee that he's funny enough to steal your girlfriend within five minutes of meeting her (and may be able to convert your boyfriend, too), and Galifianakis is a treasure so precious that the only explanation for why he isn't in twenty comedies a year is because including his mile-long last name in the credits doubles the movie's run-time.
But they aren't given any of those killer moments of raw hilarity that would have made the difference between something enjoyable and something great. The Hangover's laughs are mostly the generic kind you aren't likely to remember a couple weeks from now. Is that worth seeing? You could do worse. But you could do better, too.
Grade: B-