The Hangover is basically what would have happened if Judd Apatow made Dude, Where's My Car?, sprinkled with little bits of Harold and Kumar. The similarities between this and Dude, Where's My Car are so great that Danny Leiner probably refers to this film as "Dude, Where's My Royalties?", and the frequency I'm going to mention it during this review merits an acronym.

The Hangover is about a group of friends who go for a stag night in Las Vegas, get completely wasted, and can't remember anything or find their friend in the morning, so have to retrace their crazy antics of the night just passed. All of the characters are very broad; There's the rebel, the geek, the weirdo, and the groom who's just flat and uninteresting but is needed to appear normal and give the whole thing a sense of realism. The "star" of the show is Alan, played by Zach Galifianakis, who is basically just a fat, bearded Will Ferrell. Hate to bring it up again, but Alan is very similar to the two main characters of DWMC, but with an added hint of "Take my strong hand".

The film never establishes the bride and groom very well, and spends the majority of the start setting stuff up for later in a very obvious way, so I personally didn't give a shit about if they found him or got back in time for the wedding, and without being invested in the main drive of the plot, it was just a series of ridiculous scenes.

The gang arrives in Vegas and they all promise to not remember the rest of the night, in what was a cringe-worthy and ultimately pointless nod to the rest of the film. Are we supposed to watch the film and then go "Hey, I just recalled that part where they all promised to not remember the rest of the night and then they didn't remember the rest of the night. HAHAHAHAHA This film just went from great to fucking amazing. Get me a new pair of pants. I came."

There's all sorts of crazy antics, including being hunted by some crazy Chinese people (Zoltan group from DWMC), owing money to the Chinese man (Transsexual from DWMC), getting their car impounded (just like in DWMC, and it even has the same woman playing basically the same role as DWMC), a crappy cameo from a famous person (Mike Tyson) (Neil Patrick Harris in Harold and Kumar) which involves taking a tiger back in a car that then happens to regain consciousness on the way (Identical to the raccoon scene from Harold and Kumar; in fact the whole big cat thing is stolen from Harold and Kumar). It even has a crappy way of tying things up in a boring scene where they win a lot of money from counting cards. At least when they tied things up in a crappy way with the lockers in DWMC it was funny.

Also, why the fuck did their friend stay on the roof for like 2 days?? Use your phone or failing that, smash a sky light. I just had to put up with near 2 hours of unoriginal randomness and racism because you have no common sense. Prick.

At it's very best, it's humourous, however, for the majority of the film it's painfully unfunny. There's nothing original here, and it's not even like they've ripped things off and made them better.

Now they've made The Hangover 2, and I can only wish that they'd have kept the age-old morning-after promise. "We're never drinking again."