Mr. Beaks Happily Endures THE HANGOVER!

Todd Phillips's THE HANGOVER opens with its three principals - Bradley Cooper, Ed Helms and Zach Galifianakis - stranded in the desert, very much the worse for wear, admitting the unconscionable to their best friend's bride-to-be: after an epic evening of carousing in Las Vegas, they've lost the groom. Cooper, framed in a tight close-up, unshaven and sporting a busted lip, is the unlucky bastard tasked with making the call, and he seems to have drawn the assignment on account of his supreme lack of tact. "We fucked up," he confesses. On the other line is the bride, Tracy (Sasha Barrese), done up in her wedding dress back in Los Angeles, surrounded by her family, hours away from watching the happiest day of her life turn into an utter humiliation. "What happened?" is the hook of Phillips's raucous, unrepentantly R-rated comedy, which finds the director back in the boys-behaving-monstrously business for the first time since his 2003 triumph, OLD SCHOOL. Back where he belongs. Whereas Judd Apatow specializes in sweet-natured films about the plight of emotionally awkward man-children, Phillips is at his best when raging against the responsibility of married life. In OLD SCHOOL, his characters coped by retreating to their frat-boy prime; in THE HANGOVER, they find solace in a twenty-four-hour Vegas romp on the eve of a wedding. But while the archetypes are familiar in Phillips's latest - there's the happily-married lout, Phil (Cooper), the responsible-but-joyless cuckold, Stu (Helms), and the decent regular guy, Doug (Justin Bartha) - he cleverly deviates from the formula by removing the audience surrogate in the first act and bringing to the fore a strange little creature for whom there is no frame of reference. That would be Alan, the socially maladjusted brother of the bride played to the manic hilt by Galifianakis. Alan is first glimpsed in a family portrait, where his expectant, mouth-agape smile suggests more of the family dog than a thirtysomething-year-old son. From there, he's seen excoriating a tailor for touching his junk. Alan's off. Big time. And his inclusion in this bachelor odyssey is largely obligatory: a well-meaning gesture of brother-in-law camaraderie and a way to get Alan's crazy ass out of the house while the rest of the family prepares for the wedding. Alan is immediately a disastrous mix with Phil, a morally bankrupt middle-school teacher who's funding his weekend in Vegas via oblivious donations from his students. Phil's that incorrigible best friend for whom one's constantly making apologies. He's the kind of guy who'll roll up to your house and bellow "Paging Dr. Faggot" for the entire neighborhood to hear rather than get out of the car and ring the doorbell. Phil is only socially presentable when his wife and kid are in tow; when let off the leash, he makes Vince Vaughn's Beanie look like Atticus Finch. Phil's rough on all of the guys, but he actively antagonizes Stu, a successful dentist who's planning on proposing to his shrill, controlling girlfriend upon returning from Vegas. Stu's a good guy who's never lived a day for himself; he's easily bullied and tragically open to suggestion. And he's about to make the worst mistake of his life by presenting his live-in harpie - who thinks the boys are enjoying a civilized weekend in Napa Valley - with his grandmother's Holocaust ring. Actually, that'd be the second worst mistake of his life; the first would be bringing the priceless heirloom to Vegas. This is a spectacularly tasteless touch for which I salute Mr. Phillips and his writers (Jon Lucas and Scott Moore). Once in Vegas - and after upgrading to a lavish suite at Caesar's Palace via Stu's credit card - the quartet congregate on the roof of the hotel to begin the evening's debauchery with shots. Cut to the following morning, and the suite is trashed. As the boys blearily rouse themselves to take stock of the damage, a number of alarming discoveries are made: there's a rooster roaming about, a tiger chained up in the bathroom, and a bawling infant stashed away in a closet. But what's there isn't nearly as distressing as what's missing; Stu, for example, is down a tooth and a Holocaust ring. And, of course, there's no Doug. Unable to recall a single second of their evening following the rooftop shots, the boys must haphazardly backtrack by examining the contents of their pockets and whatever clues are strewn about the room. Unfortunately, more questions are raised. The baby, which Alan inexplicably dubs "Carlos", belongs to a stripper (Heather Graham). Fixable enough, right? Problem is, Stu married that stripper. And that's just the beginning of their fuck ups. Why was Phil briefly hospitalized? Where's the Rolls, and how did they come to valet a cop car? Why are they being chased down by trigger happy thugs? Perhaps that has something to do with the buck-naked Asian crimelord (a fearless Ken Jeong) they've stuffed in the trunk of the impounded Rolls. And, most puzzlingly, why in the hell did they steal Mike Tyson's pet tiger? The solving of the mystery is fun enough, but the biggest laughs in THE HANGOVER are character-based - and that's because the Cooper/Helms/Galifianakis team is every bit the equal of Wilson/Vaughn/Ferrell. Of the three stars, Cooper has probably been closest to a breakthrough, but he's never been this caddishly charismatic. With Bartha's everyman Doug out of the picture, Phil, despite his bacchanalian nature, becomes the sanest man in the film (Stu's too weak-willed, while Alan is simply certifiable). Cooper's got an Eric Stratton glow to him; yes, he's a weasel, but he's our weasel. And just as we cheer Stratton on as he romances the roommate of a recently expired college student, we root for Phil to swagger his way out of a debacle for which he is largely responsible. Cooper may be too naturally devious to ever work as a classic leading man, but he's got that same irrepressibility that made Chevy Chase a movie star for a time. The only difference is that Cooper's got better chops. He'd make a great Fletch. Compared to his doormat of a character on THE OFFICE, Helms's Stu is a paragon of machismo: i.e. his fiance has only been unfaithful once, not incessantly (and in the same building). The novel twist with Stu is that he's already come out of his shell; he just has to remember why he snapped and became his own man. Helms delivers the subtlest performance in the film, and the most human. It's a marked contrast to Galifianakis, who's beginning to look like the most insane, sui generis comedic talent since Jonathan Winters. Alan isn't the most touched character Galifianakis has played (that would be "Zach Galifianakis" in "Between Two Ferns"), but there's never a moment when the audience feels at ease with this mental defective. And yet he gets the film's hero scene when he insists on his Raymond Babbitt-esque blackjack skills. Time will tell whether THE HANGOVER has the durability of OLD SCHOOL, but, all told, it feels like the more satisfying movie. If anything, it cements Phillips's reputation as an expert director of ensemble comedy. He makes order out of chaos better than nearly anyone out there. And he's the best apologist for guys behaving like guys we've got (without cheating - unless they're engaged to an awful human being). This is an undeniable return to form. Faithfully submitted, Mr. Beaks