DVD Movie Review: "The Hangover" (R)

Most overrated movie of 2009: "The Hangover"

When you see the trailer to "The Hangover," you see four guys (2 best friends, a groom and his future brother-in-law) living it up in Vegas. A typical storyline that has been done since the dawn of time, the hype that built around this movie was so huge, it cast itself in the light of all-time best comedies. This $35 million dollar comedy grossed $277 million dollars in the U.S. alone, so I thought to myself "This must be a great comedy to have grossed this much!" How wrong I was.

Angelenos Doug Billings (Justin Bartha) and Tracy Garner (Sasha Barrece) are about to get married. Two days before the wedding, the four men in the wedding party - Doug, Doug's two best buddies Phil Wenneck (Bradley Cooper) and Stu Price (Ed Helms), and Tracy's brother Alan Garner (Zach Galifianakis) - hop into Tracy's father's beloved Mercedes convertible for a 24-hour stag party to Las Vegas. After a night of partying with no memory of the previous nights events, they try and piece together what happened hoping they can find their friend Doug. As they find clues to his disappearance, things seem to get weirder and weirder leading them all over Vegas trying to get back in time for Doug's wedding day.

The first 20 minutes of this film are grueling. You have all the characters getting setup as to who they are, what their homelives are about, etc. Once they get to Vegas, the tempo picks up only to come back to a hault as they try to piece together the events of the previous night and find the groom Doug. Throughout the film, the jokes are flying but I really only laughed at a few of them. The gross-out humor just isn't funny in an adult comedy. It might work in "American Pie" but not on this level.

I think the breakout acting in this movie has to go to Zach Galifianakis and Ed Helms. Galifianakis made the role of the strange, isolated person named Alan shine and had more laughs than anyone else. Helms was good as "whipped" Stu who refused to dump his controlling girlfriend who cheated on him with a cruise ship worker. Bradley Cooper's performance was ok but the typical "mid-life crisis" guy trying to hang on to his youth.

Chris's Rating: 2 Stars out of 4 - Overrated comedy that had a very lame ending. Has a sequel on the way next May. Hope it's not as overhyped as this one was.