The premise of The Hangover is that the morning after a wild bachelor party in Las Vegas, the 3 groomsmen have no recollection of the night before and the groom is missing. Added to that, they wake up in their trashed hotel suite with: a chicken, a missing tooth, an abandoned (but happy) baby, a hospital wrist band, and a tiger. And that’s not the end of the list of surprises. The movie does a remarkably good job of explaining these oddities. The only remaining mystery at the end of the movie, by my count, was the chicken.
That gives the movie a chance to be an exceptional comedy. (A movie build on whacky events without plausibility can provide funny moments, but without some underlying consistency it will ultimately be merely a disappointment.) I found the rapid-fire unraveling of the movie’s many mysteries occasionally distracting and more often funny in an abstract way. The movie jumps between the morning after and various flashbacks to the night before, lending a lot of the action a second-hand feel. It was at times more like listening to your friend tell you about something really funny that happened to him than it was a visceral first-hand experience.
Which is not to say that it is not very funny to hear about your friend’s misadventures with Mike Tyson’s tiger or the time his friend got married to an escort at Vegas wedding chapel. It’s just that it’s usually funnier to see it unfold firsthand rather than have it explained after the fact. It’s kind of like starting off with a bag of punch lines and then learning the set-ups one by one.
i disagree. I thought what made this movie work was that the audience and the characters always had the same amount of information.
as for the chicken, i suspect it was a last minute thing. “what other crazy stuff can we add to the hotel room?” “let’s throw a chicken in there!”