Sins Against Cinema movies that hate humanity (and the people that love them)

The Hangover

THE PAIN, THE PAIN

Comedy is the riskiest and most demanding of all performance arts. When it's done wrong, there is no saving it. This applies to comedy as a cinematic genre, of course. To me, a bad-movie aficionado, bad films can nevertheless be entertaining: the thriller that fails to thrill, the mockbuster non-stravaganza, the dud romance and the overwrought melodrama all can provide top-notch hilarity, at least in principle.  But a bad comedy?  There is nothing worse than an unfunny comedy, as there is nothing to be done with them. Ask the guys from Best Brains, the folks what done brought MST3K to life. There's a reason why they only did one straightforward comedy in ten years — 1967's Catalina Caper. Namely, it sucked. It really was one of the least funny MST3K episodes, right up there with Monster A-Go-Go.

Now before I slip into full-bore rant mode, let me make some preliminary, clarifying statements about today's installment, The Hangover. Far as I can tell, its critics fall into two camps: outright morons complaining of its lack of "star power", and those that focus on its crudity, its juvenilia, and its sexism. And fair enough, as the humor is crude, juvenile, and sexist. But that doesn't bother me, not in the least. What bothers me is that its humor isn't funny. Not once, for that matter, did I find myself wishing for Vince Vaughn or Jack Black to replace Zach Galifianakis. I was too busy wishing for the pain to end.

Unbelievably, Roger Ebert actually seemed to have liked this movie, but all he gives by way of explanation is "The Hangover is a funny movie, flat out, all the way through. Its setup is funny. Every situation is funny. Most of the dialogue is funny almost line by line"... Now, to be fair, the setup is funny, or at least has the potential to be funny. Three comically mismatched adventurers come to in a trashed hotel room, missing money, teeth, memory, and their engaged buddy, the man they were supposed to be watching out for on his last bachelor fling. Throw in Galifanakis (one of the funniest men alive), Ed Helms, and Jeffery Fuckin' Tambor ferchissakes, and you should have had comedy gold. What you get is awful, a punishingly unfunny waste of time. It's a fiasco of comedy fails.

There's three fundamental problems here. Number one, the first thing this movie does after the opening credits roll is jump the shark, and it continues to jump every freakin' shark it can find, as a matter of course, from beginning to end. With no context, and no setup, Galifianakis drops his pants to reveal he's wearing weird, assless underwear. I mean we're not into the movie proper for twenty seconds and they're already dropping their pants? Not a good sign, but it only gets worse when the second problem becomes evident: there's not a single sympathetic character. NOTE TO HOLLYWOOD: there has to be a sympathetic character. HAS TO. Get that through your thick skulls. For addlepated young adults raised on reality television it may be different, but in a comedy populated mostly by self-absorbed weirdos it is crucial that you have an everyman/straightman/recognizable human being as a foil. If Arrested Development were nothing but Gob and Lucille and Tobias acting nutters, it would run aground. So while Michael Bluth isn't the funniest character in the show, he is the most important, the emotional anchor, the reason it all works. He's like The Dude's Rug: he pulls the room together. The Hangover has no emotional center, no real human beings. Instead it has caricatures: the weird guy, the sleazebag, the pussywhipped milquetoast.

But it's the third of the film's fundamental flaws that really puts the pain in this prescription. Every joke, every setup is really really stupid, and really really obvious, and the film grimly, determinedly, grinds through them anyway. Early in the film, the characters discover that the bathroom of their hotel suite is occupied by a tiger—an actual, live tiger. Now, this is already enormously over the top, unfunny, and unecessary, but if they'd just let it go at that maybe I'd forgive it. But no. They have Galifianakis go into the bathroom, do a double-take on the tiger, and go into a spaz routine that would shame Lou Costello. Whereupon he goes out and informs Brad Cooper, who doesn't believe him, who then sticks his head through the door and... Jesus, it's tedious even providing a synopsis. And the whole goddamned movie is like that. Helm's girlfriend is a ludicrously unlikeable hag, a miserable, glass-shard-radiating bitch, but The Hangover won't let that one come and go. Ohhh no, you get not one, not two, but a seemingly uncountable number of scenes in which Helms grits his teeth and suffers the presence of this castrating hound of hell, and the only thing missing is the laughtrack. In another scene, a some fat fucking kid with a face any decent person feels compelled to punch gets to shoot Galifianakis in the face with a taser. Not only to they telegraph this one, they do it in slow motion.

So it goes. One shitty, drawn-out gag after another parades across the screen. At one and 3/4 hours it feels as long as the siege of Stalingrad, but nowhere near as funny. Even the movie's soundtrack sucks, a pitiless melange of cheap-pimpin' hood rap and shitty autotuned covers of pop songs. It is aggressively, wantonly bad. If this movie were a person I would tell them to get the fuck out of my house and never darken my door again. I would then threaten them with a baseball bat. God, I hate this movie.