The Hangover Review

The structural idea is the whole reason this endures while its imitators do not. Phillips cuts the bachelor party itself out of the film and starts the morning after, so the audience sits in the same position as the characters, working backward from evidence: a tiger in the bathroom, an infant in the closet, a hospital bracelet, a missing tooth. It is a detective picture in which the detectives are the culprits, and nearly every scene has a real investigative function, which is rare in a comedy this broad.

Zach Galifianakis is the discovery, playing Alan not as a wacky friend but as someone genuinely unwell whom the film keeps declining to explain. Bradley Cooper and Ed Helms are correctly cast as the two ordinary registers around him. Phillips shoots Las Vegas in a sun-bleached palette that does real work. The gangster material is broad and has aged worst, and the closing photographs are a cheat that finally hands the audience what the film spent ninety minutes refusing them. It still works. The architecture is the joke.