Dudes Doing Vegas: Eating and Other Stuff

The immaturity of ostensibly grown-up American men is an inexhaustible subject, or at least one that has yet to exhaust American movie audiences and the well-paid guys who cater to their entertainment needs. Todd Phillips, the director of “Old School,” “Road Trip” and an HBO documentary called “Frat House” as well as a writer of “Borat,” has shown himself to be an adept and tireless connoisseur of male boorishness and stupidity, though the crude humor he dispenses is frequently leavened by nuggets of inventiveness and wit.

So I should say up front that “The Hangover,” Mr. Phillips’s new movie (written by Jon Lucas and Scott Moore, who contributed to the shockingly nonterrible script of “Four Christmases” and wrote the less surprisingly dreadful script of “Ghosts of Girlfriends Past”) is often very funny. This is partly thanks to the three principal actors, Bradley Cooper, Ed Helms and Zach Galifianakis, who incarnate familiar masculine stereotypes in ways that manage to be moderately fresh as well as soothingly familiar.

Mr. Helms is the anxious, nerdy dude — a dentist only because making him an accountant would deprive the film of a choice tooth-extraction gag — who lives in cowering terror of his bossy, judgmental girlfriend (Rachel Harris). Mr. Galifianakis is the childlike loser whose borderline-creepy non sequiturs are more hilarious the less sense they make. But it is Mr. Cooper who offers the most interesting variation on an old standard, playing his aggressive, cocky frat boy with a snarl of rage that masks an anxiety as hard to account for as it is to miss.

These three — Stu (Mr. Helms), Phil (Mr. Cooper) and Alan (Mr. Galifianakis) — drive to Las Vegas from Los Angeles with another buddy, Doug (Justin Bartha), who seems much better adjusted than the others, which is to say blander and duller, and who mercifully vanishes for most of the picture. Doug is about to get married, and a wild bachelor weekend spins out of control.

Phil, Stu and Alan wake up to find their luxury suite at Caesars Palace a shambles, with a tiger in the bathroom, a baby in the closet and a chicken scratching around the detritus of what looks to have been quite a bacchanal. Stu has a missing incisor, Phil has a hospital bracelet around his wrist, and Doug is nowhere to be found. What on earth could have happened?

In answering that question “The Hangover” peaks early and runs out of steam long before the end. This is probably inevitable, since even the craziest stuff has a way of becoming less so in the course of being explained. Still, there are some moments of dizzying, demented lunacy, most of them immune to being spoiled by mere verbal description. (The verbal jokes I will leave for you to discover and repeat with your co-workers in the break room.)

Mike Tyson shows up to sing along with a Phil Collins song. Mr. Galifianakis is tasered. So are the other two. By schoolchildren on a field trip. Have I ruined anything? No, I’ve just whetted your appetite.

But true to its title, “The Hangover” goes down smoothly enough and then kicks you in the head later on, when you start to examine the sources of your laughter. There’s the easy, lazy trafficking in broad ethnic caricature — Mike Epps as a black drug dealer, Ken Jeong as a prancing, lisping Asian gangster known as Mr. Chow — which is decked out in flimsy air quotes to make it seem as if the movie is making fun of racism.

And the movie, for all its queasiness about male bodies and the thin line between friendship and, you know, other stuff, can’t be called homophobic either. It is much more panicked by the idea of heterosexuality, from whose terrors and traps the whole Vegas adventure is an escape. The city itself is not a place of sin but rather, for Stu, Phil and Alan, an Eden of the narcissistic, infantile id.

Alan, in spite of his heavy beard, is almost literally a giant baby, his soft-bellied body appearing swaddled in a sheet and, most memorably, in a jockstrap that looks like a badly applied diaper. Until the end credits — which shuffle through still photographs from a harder-edged, more nastily and candidly adult movie — the on-screen nudity consists of male buttocks and a woman’s breast in the mouth of a nursing infant. This pretty much sums up the movie’s psychosexual condition, which old-school Freudians might identify as pregenital, more preoccupied with eating and elimination than with, you know, other stuff.

The tiny handful of women who have speaking roles in “Hangover” may at first seem to be conventional figures in the straight-male imaginary — the sweet and patient bride; the emasculating, hypocritical shrew; the friendly prostitute (a sunny Heather Graham) — but they are all really incarnations of mommy. There is a bad mommy who won’t let you play, a good mommy who cleans up your mess and kisses your boo-boos and an extra special mommy who offers you her nipple even when you don’t pay for it as most of the other kids do. What hangover? This movie is safe as milk.

“The Hangover” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). Bad words and naughty stuff no child would be dumb enough to try.

THE HANGOVER

Opens on Friday nationwide.

Directed by Todd Phillips; written by Jon Lucas and Scott Moore; director of photography, Lawrence Sher; edited by Debra Neil-Fisher; music by Christophe Beck; production designer, Bill Brzeski; produced by Mr. Phillips and Dan Goldberg; released by Warner Brothers Pictures. Running time: 1 hour 36 minutes.

WITH: Bradley Cooper (Phil), Ed Helms (Stu), Zach Galifianakis (Alan), Heather Graham (Jade), Justin Bartha (Doug), Rachel Harris (Melissa), Mike Epps (Black Doug), Ken Jeong (Mr. Chow), Jeffrey Tambor (Sid) and Mike Tyson (himself).