The Hangover

Old School fans, remove your earmuffs: This messy, raunchy farce about three groomsmen (Bradley Cooper, Ed Helms, Zach Galifianakis) on a lost-weekend bender in Sin City is uneven but funny, continuing director Todd Phillips’ fascination with the alpha male’s default setting — childhood reversion. To put it another way: This is a movie about three yutzes who wake up facedown in a high roller’s suite with live chickens, a smoldering armchair, and a Jacuzzi full of inflatable livestock. At that point, they must answer the burning question: Dude, where’s my groom? As their search leads from cut-rate wedding chapel to no-tell motel, the Jon Lucas and Scott Moore screenplay strives to strew banana peels in their path — most amusing, some merely desperate. What proves consistent is the chemistry among Hangover‘s three species of party animal: Cooper has the smarmy look of an avocational gynecologist; Helms uses his Whiffenpoof features to manic effect, with a girlish shriek for each new catastrophe; and the bearlike Galifianakis, a master at detonating sicko one-liners with a slow fuse, adopts a gut-forward toddle and an air of guileless hedonism. Together, they form a lopsided portrait of flabby, shabby wannabe machismo — an instant rejoinder to the old taunt “man up.”