Honestly, I fully expected to hate The Hangover, but it was actually pretty funny.
That’s about it. It’s as simple as that. It’s not like the movie is a great advance in the art of comedic film, but it definitely knew how to do it right. The basic premise is simple enough (guys in Vegas can’t remember what happened last night and hilarity ensues/ed), but where it exceeds is how it takes takes that simplicity, complicates it, and runs with it. Being a writer, simply watching a movie that will throw a tiger in a bathroom at you one minute and then a valet returning with a cop car the next all with an increasingly complicated and hopefully upcoming explanation of how they got there in the first place was fun for me simply by wondering how they wrote the script and kept track of it all. Amazingly enough, it did. Somehow the movie actually does manage to explain itself by the end, taking the viewer through an increasingly absurd aftermath of a forgotten night out, jumping back and forth between humor you laugh through and humor you cringe through. Very rarely do the mostly unlikeable characters actually provide any of the humor (intentionally), as most of the laughs are simply provided by the situation, which, as it tends to be pointed out by the more unfortunate characters, really wouldn’t be very funny at all. The Hangover basically becomes the ultimate in schadenfreude: the absurd consquences (causes largely unknown, yet reasonably assumingly deserved) are really only funny because someone else has to deal with them.
While the movie doesn’t really make any kind of moral clear, as it kind of continuously skips back and forth between “drinking and partying is wrong” and “…but you can get away with it”, it illustrates the consequences quite vividly for the sole purpose of pointing and laughing at them, and definitely not with them.
Aaand can’t think of anything else to say. Not feeling super funny today. Know what is though? The Hangover. Better than the real thing.
