The Hangover Made $467 Million and Won a Golden Globe. It's Still Mostly a Mean Weekend

I'd like to begin by admitting the obvious, so nobody writes me a letter. The Hangover was a giant hit. It came out in 2009, cost around $35 million, and made more than $460 million around the world. It won the Golden Globe for best musical or comedy. Critics liked it, 79 percent on Rotten Tomatoes. It made Bradley Cooper a movie star and Zach Galifianakis a household name, which for a man with that name is the hardest thing in show business.

So I'm not saying it isn't funny. I'm saying it's less funny than you remember, and you remember it from 2009, when you were younger and so were your standards.

Here's the plot. Three men lose their friend in Las Vegas the night before his wedding, and the movie is them trying to retrace a night they can't remember. It's a mystery with jokes, and the structure is clever. But look at what the jokes are. A baby in a car seat. A stolen police car. A tiger in the bathroom. A naked man in a trunk. It's a film built on things happening to people, mostly people who didn't sign up for the weekend, and the heroes' main skill is not being blamed.

The best thing in it, by a mile, is Galifianakis, who plays a man so strange and so sincere that every scene he's in feels like it wandered in from a better movie. Take him out and you have three fellows yelling in a hotel room, which you can get at any hotel for less money.

And then the sequels arrived, in 2011 and 2013, and proved the formula was thinner than it looked, since Part II was very nearly the same story moved to Bangkok. When a movie can be remade by changing the city, it wasn't the jokes doing the work. It was the hangover.

In fairness, the first one moves like a freight train, the mystery is fun, and sometimes a dumb weekend is exactly what a person needs. But a comedy should make you laugh with somebody. This one mostly laughs at whoever is closest. That's not a party. That's a hostage situation with an open bar.