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« Monday « June 8, 2009
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The Hangover: Review (4/5)
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Guy movies about rites passages - like graduating high school or college, winning the big game (and getting the girl), throwing the big party while your parents are gone, or celebrating your final days and hours of freedom as a bachelor, are common Hollywood fodder. And in that commonality there's nothing but stale formula for telling the same stories over and over and over again. The faces change, but the stories remains the same.
While I've grown to love flicks like Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Risky Business, and Bachelor Party, I've yet to see these kinds of stories retold in fresher ways in recent memory. Until this weekend. Somewhere between the puerile aesthetics of Superbad and the slightly more mature nuances of Sideways, we need to make room for The Hangover, a shot in the arm for guy movies.
It's a hilarious romp that doesn't take itself too seriously, and effectively succeeds at its simple goal: tell the story of a groom-to-be and his three friends as they paint Las Vegas red for his bachelor party. The innovation here - and yes, it's a gimmick, but it's a gimmick that works - is that the story is revealed as a comic detective caper. The four guys lift shotglasses of Jagermeister and toast the start of the bachelor party and get started ...and then we fade to black. In the next scene, three of the guys wake up in their trashed Vegas suite, with raging hangovers, and the fourth guy, the groom, is missing. The rest of the film becomes a hilarious odyssey as they try figure out what happened to their friend, and get him to the church on time, in less than 48 hours. It is a clever gimmick that gives the film a lot of energy: instead of going through another wild party, which we've seen before, we go on a journey with the guys as they piece together the night they experienced. There's nothing but laughter all along the way.
The Hangover is definitely worth the price of admission.
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