Watch The Hang Over 2009

The Hangover, Todd Phillips’ turnover to fratastic form after the substandard School for Scoundrels, marks itself as an aesthetic step up for the Old School director right from the get go. With changeable, pensive music playing on the soundtrack, the possibility credits play out over a montage of Las Vegas By Day - giant cranes breaking the skyline of dull towers, Godzilla-size advertisements for “talent” like Marie Osmond scorching in the sun - fading into the more palatable, glittery, and familiar images of Vegas By Night. This tells us right away that The Hangover means to say something about the contradictions of the city in which its set, and particularly the assessment between the Vegas myth of never-ending nights of full-on debauchery, and days spent tending head-splitting regret at all-you-can-eat buffets. But Sin City presents Donnie and Marie is only the half of it: more importantly for The Hangover’s purposes, Vegas is a city constantly in construction, creating and erasing its own totally manufactured history, a vacation spot paradoxically designed to provide inspiration for amateur photographers, which at once boasts of its ability to send the same tourists home without memories that they could relate in mixed company.
It released on the June 5th 2009 along with Away we Go.In other words: the whole goal of the modern trip to Vegas is to come home with a digital camera full of support that you had a bunch of fun that you can’t recollect and indeed are not going to talk about. So when Phil (Bradley Cooper) Stu (Ed Helms) and Alan (Zack Galifinakis) wake up in their group at Caesar’s the morning after Doug’s (Justin Bartha) bachelor party to find that their room is in a mess and they’ve been left to care for a wandering chicken, a live tiger and a inexplicable baby, the initial assumption is that this detritus is Vegas business as usual. Why can’t they remember anything that happened the night before? As Phil puts it, “Because we noticeably had a great fucking time.” So great that the brush has gone missing.
Which is interesting and all, but this is still superficially a comedy. The best joke in The Hangover might be its most inside one: as the crew drives into Vegas, Kanye West’s “Can’t Tell Me Nothing” plays on the sound track; it’s surely a nod to the video for the song, which features Galifinakis enigmatically lipsyncing in a field with Will Oldman. The discordance that makes that clip so phenomenally entertaining that it borders on profound seems to be a Galifinakis speciality, and that it follows him into the Hangover is a godsend; he’s the film’s only source of genuine surprise.
Maybe more importantly, he’s the only actor working hard enough to go above type. As written, the character is a pretty usual issue weirdo hanger on who proves himself as a worthy member of the crew by saving the day doing amazing only he can do. But long before he’s put to work in a triumphant montage, Galifinakis proves himself as the story’s real protagonist, the audience surrogate who, no topic how bad the on-screen predicament gets, is unendingly obliged just to be along for the ride. If The Hangover were just a motion picture about how Las Vegas enacts its settling of scores on the douchebag tourists who seek to overpower it, it would be as watchable as it is. It’s only thankfulness to Galifinakis that we don’t root for the house to win.