The Hangover
Dir: Todd Phillips
Rating: 1.5
Warner Bros.
100 minutes
Lots of people say that comedies don't get the respect that they deserve. I agree to an extent, but the reason for that may be that most of them don't seem to respect themselves. Very few Hollywood comedies even attempt to work as cohesive films, their plots largely function instead as containers for loosely connected set pieces, each crafted to allow for maximum joke density. As a comedy geek, this can be an occasionally appealing approach, but as a cinephile and thinking human being, it really bums me out sometimes.
Very early on in The Hangover, Alan (Zach Galifianakis) and Doug (Justin Bartha) go to pick up Phil (Bradley Cooper) from his job as a schoolteacher. They're going to Vegas for a bachelor party. While waiting, Alan seems nervous about their proximity to the school. "I'm not supposed to be within 200 feet of any school, or Chuck E. Cheese." It's a throwaway joke at best, but it's one that establishes, whether it wants to or not (and it doesn't), that Alan may be a sexual predator. Why not write a different line instead? It doesn't factor into the plot in any way, the line isn't meant to be taken literally, but Alan is the kind of character that doesn't peddle in irony, a completely un-self-aware bumbler. I know this sounds like nitpicking, but I'm really just insisting that characters don't say shit about themselves that the filmmakers don't actually mean. It's a simple request - have everything make sense.
This moment and one other, a crowd-pleasing meta-punchline Mike Tyson delivers as himself, are perfect little emblems of the mindlessness with which this movie is steered. This in the same year that countless debates were launched by James Toback's Tyson over whether it was too forgiving of its subject, too willing to downplay Iron Mike's monstrous past in order to facilitate the creation of a more sympathetic portrait of him as a tortured soul: "It's okay man, we all do crazy shit when we're fucked up." Haha! Is it funny because he's a rapist or because he's self-effacing about it? Jesus.
The thing that disappoints me most here is that on paper this movie looks pretty good. It has a solid cast of great comic actors and a fun enough concept, but The Hangover takes the easy way out every time it can. It resorts to shock nudity gags at least a half-dozen times throughout its run time, so if you thought the fat guy's butt early on in the movie was funny, just wait another half hour for the old fat guy's butt! Watching someone get tazed is inherently funny, and so are balls, so let's put the two together for the deadliest of comedy bombs! The biggest visual/aesthetic choice director Todd Phillips makes is arbitrarily inserting some of that silly really-slow-into-really-fast motion effect into sequences that don't need it. That's about it. Maybe I'm just coming off as joyless here, I don't know. It's all so lazy, though. Just because it's meant to be mindless entertainment doesn't mean we should let it get away with being stupid. Have a little self-respect!
by Andrei Alupului