The Hangover

Release Date (UK) - 12 June 2009

Certificate (UK) - 15

Country - USA

Director - Todd Phillips

Runtime - 100 mins

Starring - Bradley Cooper, Justin Bartha, Ed Helms, Zach Galifianakis

The new film from Old School director Todd Phillips tells the tale of four men who go on a stag do to Las Vegas and wake up not remembering what happened. The film then follows there journey to piece together what happened the previous night and try to find the groom, who is mising when they wake up, in time for his wedding. All of the main roles are played by then unknown actors (Bradley Cooper has already lined up a role in the forthcoming A-Team film) with a small role for Heather Graham so the distributors spent a lot of time and money promoting it before release to hype it up, and it seems to have worked as it has taken the U.S box office by storm.

After all the hype about how hilarious this film is I was a bit disappointed. I was expecting a toilet humour style film but there were only a few moments when I even actually laughed out loud, the lines were just far too predictable and obvious. There are parts of the plot however that went into new territory for this genre, Todd Philip's is obviously feeling his age as the film focuses more on settling down, Doug (Justin Bartha) is about to get married and Phil (Cooper) is already playing happy families. But then this this is counteracted by Stu (Ed Helms) who is tied down in an unhappy relationship and he discovers he married stripper Jade (Graham) on their drunk adventures. There was also a fresh take on the brat pack film with the fact that the film shows them trying to piece together what happened rather than simply showing a string of scenes of ridiculous drunken behaviour.

Obviously in a film like this you have to abandon all sense of realism but this film was made so cheap I'm not sure if they had bothered to have someone watch it before they got it into cinema's, there were so many noticeable flaws. The scene where Stu plays the piano the sound quality was unbearably crackly and badly recorded and the photos over the end credits were in completely the wrong order. Mike Tyson's scenes were also cringeworthingly awful, it almost seemed like he was trying to explain away his own past actions with 'everyone does stupid things' and then the 'whata nice guy' comments from the men almost felt like Tyson made these lines his conditions of being in the film. Also one of the worst turn offs for me is how American films have never had any problems with taking anybody with mental health problems as a point of comedy over and over again as they do with Alan (Zach Galifianakis) here, a comedy trend which I personally find insulting and intolerable.

So yeah, I didn't enjoy it, but if you love brat pack movies and crass humour then I'm sure you'll love it, there were a hell of a load of other people laughing throughout the film.