A Night to Forget

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Galifianakis, Cooper and Helms try to survive the morning after.

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The bromance--that thriving genre of the male-bonding comedy--expands geometrically and devolves predictably in The Hangover, a buddy farce designed to attract the lonely teen boys who think they're too cool for a Will Ferrell dinosaur movie. Taking the multiple-amnesia theme from the 2006 melodrama Unknown and referencing about a dozen movies set in Las Vegas, it revels in the hectic display of rude elements (sexual and ethnic stereotyping, pedophile gags, inappropriate people with their pants off) that have made the form as rigid in its conventions as Kabuki theater.

Four guys--the groom (Justin Bartha), his fiancée's oddball brother (Zach Galifianakis), a henpecked friend (Ed Helms) and the token normal guy (Bradley Cooper)--go to Las Vegas for a booze-babes-and-baccarat bachelor party two nights before the wedding. It'll be, one promises, a "night we'll never forget." Next morning, three of them come groggily to in their suite. With them are a tiger in the bathroom and an infant in the closet. Missing, to their horror, are the groom--and any memory of what happened the night before.

Director Todd Phillips made the agreeable Ferrell film Old School, and he can frame catastrophe with a comedic elegance, but he's hamstrung by another reductive script from hot writers Jon Lucas and Scott Moore (Four Christmases, Ghosts of Girlfriends Past). Virtually every joke either is visible long before it arrives or extends way past its expiration date. Even the welcome presence of Heather Graham and a deeply weird cameo by Mike Tyson can't save a bromance so primitive it's practically Bro-Magnon.