Dude, where's our groom?

AH, the dumb comedy. Ah, the Vegas flick.

A good dumb comedy is not necessarily inspired filmmaking, but it's also not automatically worthy of dismissal. If it has all the right elements -- good casting, inspired scriptwriting, absurd but decidedly lowbrow humor -- it works, as was the case with Todd Phillips 2003 breakout, Old School. A dumb comedy's funniest moments are recalled during water-cooler conversations, forgotten about until the movie shows up on Spike TV during channel-surfing sessions.

The Vegas flick, however, is so likely to be some filmmaker's caricature vision of Las Vegas that it's likely to be offensive to natives. This doesn't apply to any film set in Vegas, but it does apply to box-office fodder that partially serves as a product placement deal with a casino. 21 was a bad Vegas flick in part because it seemed like its was a commercial for Planet Hollywood and Red Rock Resort -- two brands that did not exist when the true events the movie was based on took place.

So the odds were that The Hangover would either flat out suck or be passable mindless entertainment. Phillips rises above that bar, maxing out the potential of the dumb Vegas comedy flick in part by making use of a crosscurrent of locations while still giving love to Caesars Palace, where our group of bachelors are staying to celebrate the last days of freedom for Doug (Justin Bartha). On board are Phil (Bradley Cooper), the confident stud; Stu (Ed Helms), the engaged dentist who bafflingly brings his grandmother's Holocaust ring to Vegas (dumb point No. 1), and Alan (Zack Galifianakis), the brother-in-law-to-be who possesses little tact and even less self-awareness.

Somehow the boys gain access to the roof of Caesars (dumb point No. 2), where Alan breaks out a bottle of Jägermeister and insists on starting out the evening with a shot. That's the last thing anyone remembers upon waking up the next day. Their suite is in shambles, a tiger is in the bathroom (dumb point No. 3), Stu lost a tooth and his ring is missing, and they now have a baby on board that never screams or needs its diaper changed (dumb point No. 4). Doug is missing, though, and they need to find him before the bride is ready to walk down the aisle.

If The Hangover sounds like a hybrid of Bachelor Party and Dude, Where's My Car, its kind of is. It has its share of both laugh-out-loud and WTF moments, but also contains scenes that deflate the comic momentum. Galifianakis gets to flesh out his stand-up persona for film, although he doesn't hit the genius highs he does in innumerable viral videos and sometimes it feels like screenwriters Jon Lucas and Scott Moore (Ghosts of Girlfriends Past) ran out of comic ammo for him. Phillips fanned out around Vegas to find a variety of locations to shoot, from the Riviera's casino to the southern part of Las Vegas Boulevard, where he built a wedding chapel that looks straight out of the north end of the Strip. The lack of claustrophobic confinement to casinos helps The Hangover reach higher levels of laughter that many of its predecessors don't, but that laughter is lowbrow as it gets. Stick around through the credits for additional, uh, exposure to Galifianakis.