The Hangover
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The Hangover
100-minute assault of crude behavior, violence, racial stereotypes and male nudity strung along a thin plot of three groomsmen (Ed Helms, Zach Galifianakis, Justin Bartha) searching for their pal the bridegroom (Bradley Cooper) after a drunken and drugged Las Vegas debauch the night before the wedding. Producer-director Doug Phillips and screenwriters Jon Lucas and Doug Moore work on the assumptions that any loutish behavior is hilarious, and if it's funny when a grown man gets hit in the face by a car door, it's even funnier when it later happens to an infant. Intermittent violence; pervasive crass, crude and profane language; upper female and explicit male nudity; drug use; frequent urination; and crude sexual gags, one involving an infant. O -- morally offensive. (R) 2009
The Hangover (Full Review)
The Hangover" (Warner Bros.), one of this summer's "guy comedies," is a 100-minute assault of loutish behavior, violence, racial stereotypes and male nudity strung along a thin plot.
Three groomsmen -- Stu Price (Ed Helms from TV's "The Office"), Alan Garner (stand-up comic Zach Galifianakis) and Doug Billings (Justin Bartha) -- take bridegroom Phil Wenneck (Bradley Cooper) for a final debauch in Las Vegas the weekend before his wedding.
They awaken after a night of partying with the bridegroom missing, one of them married to Jade (Heather Graham), a good-hearted stripper, an infant in the closet and, in the bathroom, a tiger that belongs to Mike Tyson. In their hung-over stupor, these oddly devoted pals tear around town reconstructing events of the night before in order to recover the groom and get him to the altar on time.
On this scenario, director-producer Doug Phillips and screenwriters Jon Lucas and Doug Moore work on the assumption that if it's funny when a grown man gets hit in the face by a car door, it's even funnier when it later happens to an infant; if one drunken urination gag is funny, three or four are hilarious; and the ne plus ultra of comedy is a naked, gay Chinese hoodlum (Ken Jeong as Mr. Chow) bursting out of a car trunk.
The droll, chubby Galifianakis does most of the heavy lifting, and the comic setups run a gamut through the tired old gag of the tiger waking up in the back seat of a car, a stale reference to Dustin Hoffman's card-counting blackjack skill in "Rain Man," and a use of police tasers that seems to have been left over from an old episode of TV's "Jackass."
The film contains intermittent violence; pervasive crass, crude and profane language; upper female and explicit male nudity; drug use; frequent urination; and crude sexual gags, one involving an infant. The USCCB Office for Film & Broadcasting classification is O -- morally offensive. The Motion Picture Association of America rating is R -- restricted. Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian.
Movies have been evaluated by the U.S. Conference of Catholic
Bishop's Office for Film and Broadcasting according to artistic
merit and moral suitability. The reviews include the USCCB rating,
the Motion Picture Association of America rating, and a brief
synopsis of the movie.
The classifications are as follows:
- A-I -- general patronage;
- A-II -- adults and adolescents;
- A-III -- adults;
- A-IV**
- L -- limited adult audience, films whose problematic content many adults would find troubling. L replaces the previous classification, A-IV.
- O -- morally offensive.
** Discontinued classification. All archived movies that were originally in the A-IV category are now classified as L.