Entertainment, Movies - Army Times

Lost in Vegas

A live chicken clucking in the kitchen. A still-smoldering couch. A blowup sex doll floating in the Jacuzzi. A cranky tiger prowling in the bathroom. An unidentified baby in the closet. A beer pyramid stacked eight cans high.

And that’s just for starters.

Yes, “The Hangover” may well have won the annual summer octoplex sweepstakes for best wacky/raunchy comedy before summer even officially begins.

It’s a surreal torrent of off-color, gut-busting moments served up by a quartet of actors whom most people will find only vaguely, if at all, familiar — and all the more remarkable for its too-familiar framework, a bacchanalian bachelor party in Las Vegas.

But “The Hangover” zealously twists that cliché into new, laugh-out-loud shapes, then doesn’t let up for two hours.

It starts innocently enough, with three longtime pals headed to Sin City on the eve of one’s wedding. The groomsmen are Phil (Bradley Cooper) and Stu (Ed Helms), and the groom is Doug (Justin Bartha).

Ah, but I said “quartet.” The troupe’s fourth member is Alan (Zach Galifianakis), the brother of Doug’s bride-to-be, a beefy, bearded ball of weirdness tuned into a much different frequency than the rest of the cosmos.

Their night of fun begins on a low-key note, as Alan pours shots of Jaegermeister to toast Doug before they head out on the town.

And then our fun begins, as the film picks up with the morning after the big night out, when Phil, Stu and Alan awake in their trashed hotel suite with heads the size of watermelons — and with Doug missing in action.

None of them can recall what happened. They come to realize that’s because Alan slipped what he thought were hits of Ecstasy into their Jaeger shots, but which were actually roofies that erased their short-term memories.

In the grand tradition of “one thing after another” flicks, the trio then spends a crazed day and night trying to retrace their steps and find the guy who’s supposed to be back in Los Angeles to get hitched the next day.

It’s a quest that has them crossing paths with the famously bipolar Mike Tyson, playing himself; the way-cute Heather Graham as a heart-of-gold stripper; two incompetent cops (veteran TV actor Cleo King and Rob Riggle of “The Daily Show”; and a shady Asian gangster (Ken Jeong) who gets a showcase scene that sent the packed house at my screening into hysterics.

Bartha has the short end of the stick, as he’s off-camera for most of the film. But the other three leads all get choice moments, especially Galifianakis, who’s making a name for himself on the indie comedy circuit as a sort of spiritual heir to Andy Kaufman.

In the tradition of great cinema man-children, he plays Alan, a “one-man wolfpack” who “really shouldn’t be within 200 feet of a school … or a Chuck E. Cheese,” with a perfect mix of innocence, bravado and psychosis.

Give props as well to director Todd Phillips, who has made a decent career of films featuring stunted-adolescent adults who refuse to admit that they should know better. He steers with a loose touch that is in perfect tune with the material.

Doug does make it back to L.A. for his wedding. But the film hardly goes all soft and gooey at the end of its tale. In the final scene, Alan reveals that he found Doug’s camera wedged in the back seat of their car.

And on that camera is a slide show of the debauched night none of them can remember — which turns into one of the wildest closing-credit sequences ever.

What happens in Vegas is supposed to stay in Vegas. Lucky for fans of rude comedy, “The Hangover” ignores that rule.

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Rated R for bachelor party shenanigans. Got a rant or rave about the movies? E-mail cvinch@atpco.com.