[Movies] The Hangover (2009)

There are just movies out there that you never imagine watching based on the synopsis alone. No matter how much hype here is or how interesting the trailers are, for some reasons there are just those movies that you can never seem to get around to see. Perhaps it's some sort of a subconscious thing - a part of your mind that rebels against the story concept and so you just ignore it over and over again every time you are faced with the opportunity to catch it.

And then one day you finally get to see it and you can't help but wonder what was holding you back before. That's just one of the many eccentricities of life, eh?

What does push us over that edge and make us watch movies like this? I mean seriously, we manage to avoid a lot of general buzz around it in the beginning. Then it takes that one conversation with a friend or colleague that totally changes your perspective or at least makes you think about seeing it again after months or even years of never taking the time to do so.

The Hangover is a quirky ensemble comedy about a group of friends who spend the night in Vegas and wake up with no recollection of what happened. But I'm getting ahead of myself here.

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Doug (Justin Bartha) is engaged to be married to Tracy (Sasha Barrese) in 2 days and his friends decide to head down to Las Vegas for his bachelor party. They are Phil (Bradley Cooper), a married school teacher, Stu (Ed Helms), a Jewish dentist in a rather abusive relationship and Alan (Zach Galifianakis), the brother of the bride and naturally the soon-to-be brother-of-the-groom. After sharing Jägermeister shots on the roof of the hotel, the 4 procede to have an extremely wild night of fun.

Fast forward to the next morning and Alan, Phil and Stu wake up in their trashed hotel room with no recollection of the events of the night before. Stu is missing a tooth. Alan has lost his pants and discovers there's a tiger in the bedroom. There's a baby in the closet. And Phil has a hospital bracelet on. To top everything off, Doug is missing. Now the friends need to follow the clues of their own adventures in order to figure out what exactly they did last night and ultimately find the groom before the wedding. Their investigations lead them all over the city and have them crossing paths with a variety of crazy characters, as is expected from movies of this nature.

Normally you'd expect the Hollywood executives to push for an ensemble cast that are either major names or very, very easy on the eyes and apart from Bradley Cooper, this group was largely unfamiliar to me. That was probably a good thing since it helped me focus more on them as characters and not get distracted by who they were as actors. They worked pretty well together as a group but not exceptionally so. As individuals they weren't all that interesting and I can't see them taking on lead roles for themselves any time soon.

The story as a whole isn't much - it's pretty much just one crazy event after another without all of them being overly linked together. That's not really a problem since this isn't some big murder mystery kind of story. It's really an amalgamation of various crazy things that we all might have gotten into at one point in our lives or another all put together. This makes it a lot easier for all of us to relate to some aspect of the group's adventures, thus endearing us to them a bit more.

Although now that I'm seriously thinking about it, I have NEVER gotten this hammered to do some of the crazy things they did. That's definitely a good thing.

After finally having seen this movie, I seriously doubt I'll choose to see it again, but that may be just. Sure, I enjoyed all the antics and I liked how we were all brought along the journey to help the group figure out just how they got to where they were that horrible morning after. However, now that we all know what happened, the re-watching value of the movie seems to dip a bit and it doesn't seem that it will just as fun to watch it all over again. It'll probably work for other people - it's just not me.

The Hangover is a light and funny look at just how bad things can get when you have that "one wild night" with friends. It gets 3 inappropriate Taser shots out of 5.