THE HANGOVER is the cinematic equivalent of one of those miracle cures for alcoholic overindulgence which promises to wipe away the painful consequences of last night's excesses.
It's the long overdue antidote to the surfeit of increasingly repetitive comedies focussing on the social and sexual ineptness and/or boorishness of twenty-something men to which the names Seth Rogen, Judd Apatow, Will Ferrell and Paul Rudd are customarily attached.
While many of the elements are reassuringly familiar, director Todd Phillips has succeeded in making them feel fresh and somehow different. His trick (although the word suggests some kind of stunt which this certainly isn't) is to treat his three lead actors as equals on screen. Where Ferrell and Rogen tend to hog the story and force the rest of the cast to play off of them, there's no such hierarchy in THE HANGOVER. The story is constructed as an ensemble piece which also allows Bradley Cooper, Ed Helms and Zach Galifianakis to take the lead in individual scenes without diminishing the importance of the other two.
Fired up by the promise implicit in the slogan "What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas", nerdy dentist Stu (Helms), laid-back schoolteacher Phil (Cooper) and heavily bearded man-child Alan (Galifianakis) take off for Sin City with buddy Doug to celebrate his impending marriage. They're determined to give him an unforgettable final hurrah before he settles down to married life but when they awake amidst the wreckage of their hotel suite the following morning none of them can remember what happened. There's a crying baby in the closet, a tiger in the bathroom, Stu's lost a tooth and Doug is nowhere to be found. It's their efforts to discover what they did that night in the hope that it'll lead them to Doug which form the backbone of the story.
Along the way they encounter a hooker with a heart of gold, a lisping gay Chinese gangster and - most bizarrely - Mike Tyson playing himself and looking fat (although I wouldn't say that to his face). They're shot at, arrested, tasered, and beaten with baseball bats as they race around Vegas trying to reconstruct their movements. What makes this such an enjoyable experience is the way that each new piece they add to the puzzle doesn't make the picture any clearer but instead suggests several different scenarios.
While there's relatively few laugh-out-loud moments there's enough to keep a smile on your face and you definitely do not want to miss the photo sequence over the closing credits.
