The Hangover

I wanted to love The Hangover. But instead I just slept with it.

Don’t get me wrong, The Hangover is very good for a laugh. Ed Helms has been great since the Daily Show and Zach Galifianakis had me at rihTARD. Plenty of comic setpieces, money dialogue, and really, one of the most fantastic premises from a screenwriting perspective that I’ve ever encountered: Piecing a night of drunken revelry back together again. Wish I’d come up with it.

The turn into the second act was classic: the inevitable “this’ll be a night we’ll never forget,” launching into our amnesiac characters sprawled across an utterly destroyed hotel suite was exactly what I wanted, hoped for, and expected. And for a while, the movie delivered. But eventually, it simply ran out of steam. No more gas in the tank. Zero wind turning the turbines. Ixnay on the olarsay owerpay. There's only so long you can flog a single joke before the lights go out.

Of course, it could have been my ridiculously high expectations. So I have to either start seeing movies like this on opening night, before the hype machine turns it into an inevitable disappointment, or I wait ten years down the road to catch it on WGN during a rain delay, and watch it with all the swear words replaced by “dummy” and “funnyface.”