The Hangover: 78 Out Of 100 Stars

The Hangover is one of 2 comedies that I'm going to review tonight that I went into with a certain degree of expectation based on reviews and friends opinions, so fairly or unfairly there will be sizable focus on whether the films went above or below my preconceived notions.

So then, The Hangover just isn't a comedy classic. It's funny, but I didn't find myself guffawing the way I anticipated I would and I think that in general, people are rating certain elements of this film way beyond what it deserves.

A lot of the Tyson stuff didn't work for me. The premise of Tyson being involved with these guys is funny, the execution not so much. It almost takes me out of the film to see Tyson "acting" because you always felt like they could have gone much further with his role but instead we sort of got a restrained "just having him say and do goofy things" is good enough, version of Iron Mike.

There is just very little originality in the story that we haven't seen a dozen times before in films like this. The creepy guy with a heart, the cuckold guy who needs the whole movie to figure out his girlfriend is an overbearing bitch, etc. It's not that I'm really complaining about those character types being in the film but people who try to act like it's somehow a groundbreaking or hilarious concept, well I just don't understand that viewpoint.

I always felt like the movie was pulling itself in two different directions, trying to fit both a morality tale/everyday guys trying to figure out life, with a raucous buddy comedy. Many of movies have made that work a lot better than this one did, for me at least.

The other thing that bothered me more than made me laugh, were 2 particular scenes involving male genitalia. For whatever reason I sort of reacted with a "oh, they're doing that again", than I did with laughter. And it's not because I don't think that shit can be funny, cause I'm as immature anyone, but it just felt like an instance of "this is what we do in our movies, we whip out our dicks, now laugh at it", rather than it being in there for any organic reason.

All that being said, it may seem like I disliked the movie, but I didn't. I smiled a lot and I laughed out loud a few times. Many of the jokes were very good and it had a generally humorous tone that made for a good 90 minutes of film watching, but this far from a great film or a great comedy.