Why would anyone care what happens to this lot! (The Hangover (DVD))

Member Name: quelconque

Product:	The Hangover (DVD)
Date:	01/11/09 (17 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: The baby's funny (-ish)

Disadvantages: Everything else

Based on the other reviews I've read I'm going to be the odd one out here. Right up front I'll say that I'm no fan of gross-out comedy, preferring to get my laughs from something that has a little intelligence and humour and probably a decent script behind it. There's no denying that there is an audience for this kind of puerile rubbish, but, perhaps because of my age, I just find it irritating. Apart from that, though, purely in terms of movie-making I have a couple of quibbles.

The plot, such as it is, revolves around a stag do in Las Vegas during which the friends of the groom get so bladdered that they haven't a clue what they've done or where they've been and end up losing the groom. I don't know about you, but when I get that drunk I just lie motionless for a long period of time and don't move. What were they drinking? I never managed to care what had happened to the groom, as he was a faceless non-entity, and this kind of undermined the premise of the movie.

So in the process of trying to find the groom they uncover the truth of the last 24 hours, and discover the reasons why they've got a baby, why there's a tiger in the room, why one of them lost his front teeth, and other hugely comic inventions. The only things that don't really get explained are why anyone thought it would be a good idea to get Mike Tyson involved (absolutely brain-squirmingly awful!) and why it's acceptable to make a comic character out of a vicious, foul-mouthed, raving queen of a Chinese gangster (xenophobic homophobia lives here!). Quibble number 1: casting. There must have been someone better than Big Mike or was he just mega-cheap and mega-desperate.

I am prepared to admit that there are some laughs, mainly involving the baby, which was the one stroke of comic imagination in the whole movie. Otherwise; few and far between.

Quibble number 2 is with the plot/script. Just too many things are trying to happen in too short a space of time. Either the script-writers didn't have enough confidence in themselves to make longer scenes work, or the director didn't give them enough time to build the humour. There's so much chopping and changing that I couldn't maintain an interest in any of the plot threads. It felt like they started off with 27 ideas in the first plot meeting and didn't have enough wit to rule any of them out, so left everything in. A sort of scattergun approach to scripting. Add that to the fact that the main characters are all pretty vile and you wouldn't really want them at your own wedding, and you've got a recipe for "can I really see this through to the end?"

I did see it through to the end, but I'm so glad I didn't actually cough up £6 to see this. (Cineworld card).
My rating: 1/10

Summary: I must be getting old!