Not that great IMO...

Rating: 5/10 (26 September 2010)

I can't exactly remember who recommended this on to me, maybe I was drugged, but I can't say I was overly impressed. I'm not a huge fan of American comedies anyway (sorry guys, I just don't get your sense of humour) so I guess that wasn't the best start. I found many things I didn't like about 'The Hangover', but it's not all bad, there were one or two good things. But more of that later, here's a short synopsis first.
Doug is getting married and, as is the tradition, he and his friends, Phil, Stu and the bride's brother, Alan are off on a bachelor party in Las Vegas. The evening starts off well with impromptu drinks on the roof of Caesar's Palace, but from then on it gets kind of messed up. Phil, Stu and Alan wake up the following morning in their hotel room. There is no sign of Doug and there's a tiger in the bathroom. They also find a baby in a closet. It's now a race against time to piece together the events of the previous evening so they can find Doug and get him to the wedding. On the way we discover, amongst other things, that they stole a police car, Stu got married to a 'dancer' called Jade and a Chinese man called Mr Chow is after them for some reason. Throw in an appearance from Mike Tyson and that's your movie folks! Do they ever find Doug?... What do you think?... I guess it's not too hard to figure out.
Unfortunately a lot of comedy filmmakers decide to make the characters so much larger than life that they just become gross parodies of themselves. For example, the character Phil is a teacher who is married with a son. He steals money from the kids in his class to finance his trip to Vegas. To me that's reprehensible behaviour, but to some people that's just funny. So, I found the humour in this film was pretty well wide of the mark to put it mildly.
OK, so what was good about it? I thought the cameo by Heather Graham as Jade was good and I found Ken Jeong as Mr. Chow very funny. Other than that there's not much to recommend, the performances of the main cast were OK but the loathsome characters and the mindless plot just left me cold. I know there are a lot of people out there that may disagree with me on this one, but not recommended IMO.
My score: 5.3/10