At some point this weekend, someone you know dearly is going to wake up with a pounding headache and a night full of regrets. We all have those painful mornings where bad nights have to be reconstructed through foggy memories. It’s just the price you pay for a night of excess (well, that and about a gallon of vomit). The Hangover is a new raunchy “guy comedy” from guilty pleasure director Todd Phillips that plays off of the universal familiarity of brutal hungover mornings. The film combines that painful quest to discover what happened “the night before” that we all know so well with the plot conventions of a 40s detective movie and the results work quite well. The Hangover will never win any awards, but it is the only movie out there that will give you the pleasure of seeing Rob Riggle shoot Zach Galifianakis in the face with a taser.

The movie opens with a man calling a bride on the morning of her wedding to tell her that he and his buddies lost the groom during their bachelor party in Vegas. From there, we go back to before the party to be introduced to the cast of characters. There’s Phil (Bradley Cooper) the perpetually adolescent alpha male of the group who constantly hazes his 30-year-old friends as if they were still in high school. There’s Stu (Ed Helms) the group’s requisite geek who’s henpecked by his adulterous wife. There’s the groom’s future brother in law Alan (the incomparable Zach Galifianakis) who’s drug-damaged brain makes him a barely functioning manchild. And finally there’s the groom (Justin Bartha), who is personalitiless and useless. But that’s fine, because his character is little more than a plot device. He only exists to disappear and give the funny characters someone to look for.

The opening 20 minutes of The Hangover are a little shaky due to the fact that it’s mostly character introduction, the big early punchlines were given away in the trailer, and the producers have attached an irritating number of forgettable top 40 hits to the soundtrack. Fortunately, the rough opening breezes by fairly painlessly before getting to the good stuff. Once the characters wake up and embark on their search, the hilarity doesn’t stop until the credits roll. The movie has the structure of an early film noir where characters who aren’t looking for trouble are forced into a surreal underground and can’t get away from it no matter how hard they try. The Coen Brothers were the first to covert this structure into comedic gold with The Big Lebowski and then Dude, Where’s My Car went and ruined it for everybody. Fortunately, The Hangover features not even one second of screen time for Ashton Kutcher, so things work out just fine.

Going into details about what specifically happens to the guys while trying to track down their friend would ruin the fun. Too many gags have already been given away by the trailers (Hollywood editors are getting way too good at making those. The Hangover trailer seriously gives away the major gags and plot points for the first 30min of the movie and that’s just too much). The guys end up with a baby, a hooker, a missing tooth, a tiger, a beef with Mike Tyson, and a police car when they wake up in the morning. And you’d better believe that even more zany shinanegins ensue after that. Make no mistake, watching The Hangover takes the brain power of a decapitated fly, but the cast is so good and the jokes come so fast and furiously that it’s hard not to be entertained.