'The Hangover'

"The Hangover" takes care of its target audience's needs -- the target audience being males who, after seeing director Todd Phillips' earlier "Old School," dreamed of joining the "Old School" fraternity.

[BobsViews]

I can see why The Hangover is of this summer’s biggest hits. First, it’s funny as hell. Any movie that can weave a baby, a missing tooth, and Mike Tyson into its plot is comedic gold. Second, the cast perfectly play off each other. Bradley Cooper’s sleazy outspoken Phil, The Office’s Ed Helms’s whipped but goodhearted Stu, Zach Galifanakis’s indescribable Alan and Justin Bartha as Doug, the Groom, pull off each gag (No matter how gross), insult and wisecrack with great comedic timing. Third, Director, Todd Philips and Screenwriters, John Lucus and Scott Moore used a different approach to tell a standard comedic story. They focus on the characters finding out what happened at the Bachelor Party instead of seeing their antics that night. Their reactions to their antics in scenes such as when Phil, Stu and Alan go to the hospital to find Doug or seeing themselves on Tyson’s security cameras are hilarious. I especially, enjoyed the twists and turns in the story such as what happened to Doug during the Bachelor Party. It was great to see some surprises in a comedy instead of the standard set-up the joke plotting. The Hangover’s success proves that not only do audiences want to laugh at the movies but also want to see well-made comedies.

-BobsViews

[Anna]

“The Hangover” is a woeful pile of such shameless cliché that it almost comes across as a knowing, winking send-up of the whole “wild weekend” genre - except it’s just not clever enough to pull off something like that. This is a gratingly dumb picture, the sort of thing that mixes frat boy midlife crisis drama with tourism board sloganeering and thinks it’s being deep...
http://99minutes.net/download/the-hangover/