Child grooms

Is it Regressive Masculinity Month? As if I Love You, Man wasn't sufficient celebration of failed maturity in American men, we now have The Hangover, a hardly alternative salute to that magical epoxy of piss, semen and vomit that help men bond.

The stunted glorification of body fluids aside, these two films, which have opened back to back in Prague, are often interchangeable - hardly surprising, considering the limited world view and wit of their creators and abettors-and each ends with a wedding after the men folk have spent the previous hour and 45 minutes trawling the shallows of their bachelor experiences.

Indeed, there is one shot - call it the "entrance of the groom and best men" scene - that is a carbon-copy visual cliché found in far too many American films: A group (usually men) walk into a medium-long shot frame in slow motion to a blaring soundtrack. Normally, they first materialize from around a corner, and then saunter, in slo-mo, into a medium or (occasionally) close shot. This presumably clever and inexhaustible take has been lifted from Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs (perhaps itself a riff on Peckinpah), though the unskillful masters of I Love You, Man and The Hangover may not be aware of this, so overused is it now as a convention.

There is one other trait that these two imbecilic flicks share, which, if anything, makes experiencing them even more depressing: Buried underneath all the soiled padding are kernels of ideas that might have been worth pursuing. In The Hangover, there are fleeting moments and elements that might have been cleverly expanded upon.

Before his wedding day, Doug (Justin Bartha) decides to have his stag party in Las Vegas with friends Phil (Bradley Cooper) and Stu (Ed Helms). For reasons never made sufficiently clear, he also feels compelled to bring along his fiancée's high-functioning, but autistic brother, Alan (Zach Galifianakis). Phil is the group's stud, who has somehow found himself working as a middle-school teacher. Stu is a spineless dentist in a relationship with a shrew, while Alan is a repository of unfortunate social faux pas.

As these four toast their wild night ahead with shots of Jägermeister on the roof of Caesars Palace (where - those wacky autistics! - Alan believes Caesar once lived), time-lapse photography will speed us through the garishly neoned night to dawn. We find that the once-chic suite the four men checked into is trashed. Sofas are smoldering, an overflowing sunken tub is filled with bubbles and abandoned rubber sex partners, a Bunuelian chicken pecks about, and a crying infant is stashed in a closet.

Phil, Stu and Alan are discovered in various degrees of collapse and undress (fans of Galifianakis' penis, and its many uses, will get their money's worth). Doug is nowhere to be found. The night before was obviously memorable, except that no one has a memory of it. The odd clues in their search for Doug will lead them to the chapel where Stu married a pole dancer and to the hospital where Phil was patched up, and where blood tests revealed that he (and presumably the rest of the stag party) were drugged. A tiger in one of their bathrooms will take them to the house of Mike Tyson (I Love You, Man, it cannot help but be recalled, came garnished with its own tough and defunct celebrity, Lou Ferrigno). And so it goes. It's The Out-of-Towners for the dull-normal.

Will our zeroes find Doug in time to get him to the wedding? For the sake of his bride-to-be, you hope not. But, inevitably, the "mystery" will be solved in a rather simplistic fashion, and everything will be conveniently wrapped up in such a way that we are now being taunted with Hangover 2.

There are three oases in this barrenness. As Stu's new stripper wife, Jade, Heather Graham brings a shot of vivacity to this rubbish, though she's given very little screen time (she's a mere woman, after all). The other performance, and one that's truly anarchic, is Ken Jeong's Mr. Chow, a vicious, gay Tong lord who has it within his power to murder and dump the bodies of the stag party out in the Nevadan wastes (sadly, he fails to achieve this).

Some of Alan's inappropriateness and social ineptitude might have worked, had it been balanced against anything resembling proper norms. But, as he's fallen into the company of three juvenile men, his delight in making it appear that the found baby is masturbating in a crowded casino dining room is just more low jinks, lacking the desired piquancy.

There is little to be said for the other  performances, or for the efforts of director Todd Phillips (Starsky and Hutch: The Movie, anyone?). Obviously, the Buddy-Bromance "comedy" genre is one of Hollywood's most successful product lines. Even more obvious: Adults are no longer welcome at the multiplex. It's high time to abandon Hollywood now that the snickering barbarians have slouched through the gates.

Steffen Silvis can be reached at
ssilvis@praguepost.com