The blackout brothers

Possibly the most comical moment in The Hangover comes when former boxing heavyweight starts air-drumming to the Phil Collins song In the Air Tonight. His cameo — weird-ass tattoo and all — is as incongruous as the free-range chicken strutting across the Vegas villa suite amid all the drunken debris.

It’s hard to find fault with a high-concept, Apatow-influenced summer comedy about men’s stupid, stupid ways. So why bother? A group of guys plan to take their pal Doug (Justin Bartha) to Las Vegas the weekend before his wedding. They include Phil (Bradley Cooper), a schoolteacher bored with marriage, Stu (Ed Helms, or Andy from TV’s The Office), a henpecked dentist who isn’t even married yet, and bearded Alan (Zach Galifianakis), who resembles Joaquin Phoenix from a recent Dave Letterman appearance.

But wait. The movie opens with a flash-forward: Phil, bruised and beaten, is in the desert, on a cell phone, telling Doug’s fiancée that something very bad has happened. The rest of The Hangover will be about picking up the missing pieces of shattered brain after a night of debauched drinking and putting the puzzle back together.

Flashback to the day before. Cue road music, Vegas lights at night, and credit cards flashing as the guys rent a $4,500-a-night suite at Caesar’s Palace. Strippers and gambling, of course, are on the menu, but first things get seriously blurry after the quartet head to the hotel’s roof to drink a toast to Doug. Next thing you know, they’re down to a trio, waking up facedown on the carpet of their villa, trying to account for the last 12 hours.

Anyone who has ever had even the slightest taste of a blackout knows how morally shaking such moments can be.

But it turns out that blacking out is the least of their worries, as someone may also have drugged them with roofies, or Rohypnol, the infamous “date rape” drug. So God knows what they really got up to in Vegas.

There’s a bare-ass stripper gathering her clothes in the apartment and leaving the scene of the crime. There’s a live baby starting to cry in the closet. There’s that damned chicken, walking around like it’s a poultry farm, as odd and inappropriate as the goat in the moviehouse in Serbis. And there’s a tiger in the bathroom.

Okay, enough spoilers. The script, by Jon Lucas, Scott Moore and director Todd Phillips, has that fashionable bromance feel to it, without ever actually going into Apatow “I love you, man” territory. They’re buds, but have only the slightest of reasons for hanging out together. Their friend, Doug, is getting married, but he’s really just a red herring — or better yet a MacGuffin, in the Hitchcockian sense: someone whose presence (or absence) sets the wheels of plot in motion, but doesn’t really have much to do with the story, ultimately. Same with that chicken, the only strand in the story that never gets explained by the time 90 minutes is up and The Hangover begins to fade from your memory as fast as your vision does after doing 12 shots of Jaeger.

In fact, for those who like to analyze scripts, there’s no through-line for three of the four main characters. They have no major conflicts to work out, they’re just doofuses trying to put the pieces together. Like Philip Marlowe after a major bender, times three.

In fact, The Hangover is probably the most idea-free summer movie I’ve seen in years. There’s no obligatory sunrise-huddle discussion about what marriage means, or montage of the lead character realizing what love is all about with appropriate music in the background; there’s not even a moment when they all clink Budweisers and say how much friendship means to them, no matter how “adult” they’re all becoming. Nah, none of that.

The closest thing to a character arc in The Hangover is Stu’s realization that he can do better than his bossy girlfriend, Melissa (played by The Daily Show’s Rachael Harris). After that “moment of clarity” is over and done with, it’s back to runty-but-dangerous Asian mobsters, stolen police cruisers, single-mom strippers who like to breastfeed in public (this is where Heather Graham comes in) and auto-dentistry. It’s a three-ring circus sideshow of Vegas-worthy details and screw-ups, but actually the plot itself is the sideshow. The details and dialogue are what carry it home safely.

Helms, without a doubt, has the best time of the bunch. Missing a tooth, the dentist peers into a mirror and declares himself a “nerd hillbilly.” He gets to play the piano and improvise a song about their predicament. Tyson meanwhile gets to show off his incomparable acting (and punching) skills and his famous lisp. The Joaquin lookalike is the most childlike of the bunch, and suffers the most number of beat-downs, though not the most humiliation. Cooper’s character stays above the fray, never developing into the Alpha Male stereotype he’s pegged to be in the opening scenes. And Doug barely exists as a character.

Perhaps the funniest touch in the movie is the credit sequence. The info-loaded credit sequence has become a favorite, a standard of Apatow/Farrelly Brothers outings, either offering outtakes or bits of extra material from the preceding narrative. Here, we get a digital camera recreation of “what actually happened” with the unfortunate quartet, a play by play in still frames on how they got so bent, and it’s worth sitting in your seats an extra couple minutes, just for clarity’s sake.

What? Seeking clarity? In a movie called The Hangover? Let’s just say, you may not remember The Hangover much a day or so later, but while you’re sitting through it the first time, it’s pretty much a hell of a ride.