The Hangover

Don't really see what all the hype's about surrounding Todd Phillips's The Hangover. Sure, some scenes are seriously hilarious, and it's fun to watch a group of rowdy dudes hit some cataclysmic highs and lows while partying it up in Vegas. But a lot of the humour is of the "taser to the groin"/"beaten down with a crowbar"/"I'm a lunatic psycho" variety and after a while all the juvenile violence wears a little thin. The lunatic psycho (Zach Galifianakis) has a lot of offbeat points to make that infuse the film with a particularly dark functionally awkward comic sensibility, but it's overt psycho awkward without the mediated ridiculousness that made famous psychos like Serial Mom and many, many Christopher Walken characters so appealing. The over-the-top shenanigans try and establish a dimension of ridiculous awkwardness but the constant jocktacular beatings and bizarre attempts to establish a realist counterpoint destabilize its productivity. It has its moments, like Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas accidentally runs into Animal House while recycling a bad "and then I #$%# her" joke, but those moments are few and far between, and the high-powered "yeah, we're full of testosterone" backbone doesn't help The Hangover convalesce.