Thursday, November 26, 2009

The Hangover

The premise of this 2009 comedy by Todd Phillips sounds like pretty standard, nee boring, fare. In fact, it sounds almost exactly like the premise of the Tom Hanks flick Bachelor Party. A guy’s about to get married. His friends want to give him one last night of wild, crazy freedom. Substitute a penthouse in Manhattan with a penthouse in Vegas and voila. Things get crazier than anyone imagined and the groom barely makes it back in time and, since he cut it so close, he went from potential disaster to hero status. That said, Todd Phillips does arrange the story in unique way and the performances are good. Instead of a straight linear storyline, the movie starts at the end and the viewer, like the characters in the movie, has to slowly figure out what happened the night before. You see, someone slipped them all ruphies and this, mixed with a ton of drinking, led to one crazy night, a total lack of memory about it and more than a little baggage, not the least of which includes losing the groom. The movie is not only finding him but, wait for it, finding each other. Alright, so I’m jaded, but it’s true that most of this movie is pretty formulaic. Still, I laughed and occasionally I laughed alot. Zach Galifinakis is pretty funny and Ken Jeong is freaking hilarious. Long story short, it’s not great, but it’s fun and at times good for a laugh.

Saturday Afternoon

1 comment:

aptron said...

Best use of Mike Tyson and a Phil Collins song in a movie.

Classic Phil.