Apparently, sometime between the
Lethal Weapon movies bowing on screens in the '80s and Paul Rudd looking for a best man in the recent comedy
I Love You, Man, the Golden Age of Bro Cinema happened. As
GQ Magazine so helpfully points out, the term "bro" "originally evolved from the Middle English (
"I knowe ynogh, on even and a-browe"--G. CHAUCER); evolved during the '60s as "brother," used by African-Americans to indicate a shared history of struggle. Now used a lot by white guys to indicate a shared history of that time you puked at White Castle."
This week, two specimens of testosterone-driven cinema debut on local screens. One shows manly men piloting sleek aircraft and blowing things up. The other involves three best men looking for a lost friend in the wilds of Las Vegas a day before said friend's wedding. Two likely entries in the emerging subgenre of Bro Cinema. But really, only one of them is a Bro Movie.
Let's start with the one that isn't:
G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra. Remember that distant time when the toys existed as merchandising for the movie? Now, thanks to Hasbro (a perfectly named corporation for the Golden Age of the Bro, if there ever was one), it's the other way around. If the other Hasbro movie of the season is any indication, then
G.I. Joe is everything you'd expect it to be: just as loud, just as emptily bombastic, just as devoid of "acting" as
Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen.

What makes
G.I. Joe marginally better than that other movie about robots that can hide themselves as monster trucks is what it is by default: an exposition movie. In laying out its plot about an evil corporate magnate named McCullen(Christopher Eccleston, emoting enough for a whole village of loud, abrasive Scotsmen) who intends to enslave the world via nanotechnology--that branch of theoretical physics which postulates that subatomic particles can be manipulated into doing anything from killing cancer cells to devouring toxic waste--the filmmakers clumsily toggle from the present to the past in order to explain their characters' motivations. Which is how you come to know that the Joes' newest recruit Duke (Channing Tatum), has a past with the requisite slinky villainess, the Baroness (the generically beautiful Sienna Miller who, in brunette coloring, looks like a straight-haired Evangeline Lilly); or that the silent operative Snake Eyes (masked and wordless throughout, so I didn't even bother looking him up in the credits) has a shared childhood with the requisite martial-arts villain Storm Shadow (Byung-hun Lee, who is inexplicably always dressed in white despite his crepuscular name).
So anyway, through his terribly deformed scientific genius The Doctor (whose actor I won't reveal as it will spoil an already spoiled movie), McCullen has created the first successful nanotech weapon and sold it to the US military. But the truth is, he only needed the sale to fund his research and development, and so he's commissioned The Baroness, Storm Shadow, and their ilk to steal the weapon back from the military. And it is up to G.I. Joe, the elite branch of the armed forces with super-advanced fighting skills and weaponry of their own, to stop this evil plan from coming to fruition.
If you can overlook the glaring holes in the plot, (According to theoretical physics, nanotechnology is self-replicating, so why would McMullen need to steal back something that is theoretically limitless? For an elite fighting force, G.I. Joe's headquarters are ridiculously easy to infiltrate. And maybe you can explain this away via political correctness, but it's a little jarring to have an outfit named G.I. Joe be populated by British and French-Moroccan operatives.) then sit back and enjoy the mind-numbing ride. But make no mistake: this is no bro movie. Yes, there are neat explosions, women in tight catsuits, and that high-five brand of machismo, but G.I. Joe is too sleek and too corporate an entertainment to be called a Bro Movie. At its heart, the Bro Movement is defined by that love a guy feels for another guy who will always have his back--the less succinct, sappier definition of "Bros before 'hos." At its heart...well, I'm not sure
G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra even has a heart. Calling
G.I. Joe a Bro Movie would be like calling
Top Gun a Bro Movie, only that would be an insult to
Top Gun.
Now,
The Hangover...ah, where to begin? Do I begin with that scene where Justin Bartha, playing Doug, the groom about to embark on his last night of debauchery in Las Vegas before getting hitched, gets hugged by his nutzoid-bordering-on-insane brother-in-law Alan (Zach Galifianakis), who is wearing only a tee shirt and a jockstrap? Or how about that scene where
The Office's Ed Helms, playing Stu, a desperately buttoned-down dentist who is in desperate need of rescue from his slave-driving lady (Rachel Harris), is fetched by his good-looking friend Phil (Bradley Cooper) with a hale and hearty "Paging Doctor Faggot!" Or how about the nifty character twist that has Phil, the most eager to be debauched and the most open to highjinks, be not just a high school teacher...but also the only one among this crew of four friends to be happily married?
The Hangover is directed by Todd Phillips, the director and sometime-screenwriter who also helmed
Road Trip and
Old School, which makes him the putative Martin Scorsese of Bro Cinema. Both the director and his characters look upon this trip--in fact, the very concept of Las Vegas--as the Promised Land of Debauchery. At their essences, a road trip to Las Vegas and a pilgrimage to Lourdes are the same: You've heard of their reputations, you go expecting
something to happen, and then upon arriving at the fabled land, you realize that everything has been so organized and touristy that the promise of debauchery or miracles--something raw and authentic--has been bleached out of the place.
Of course, the twist in
The Hangover is that something does, indeed, happen: After settling in at their beyond-their-means suite in Caesar's Palace, the band of four toast each other at the roof...and then they wake up the next morning with a tiger in the bathroom, a baby in the cabinet, Stu missing his right incisor, and Doug the groom just...missing. The whole movie is structured in revelatory
Oh my God, I did that
?! detective fashion, and while I can't spoil what is a truly hilarious, laugh-a-minute movie, all I will say is that the unearthed memories involve a stripper (Heather Graham), an Asian gangster (Ken Jeong, who played a grumpy doctor in the Judd Apatow comedy
Knocked Up), and a debate over why the date-rape drug Roofies are called Roofies and not Floories (because that's where you end up after taking them).
The Hangover is a Bro Movie not just because the lowest of the low in masculine behavior--that part of a guy who refuses to go gently into the good night of adulthood--serves to undermine everything that is so organized and touristy about the Vegas experience, but because the central mystery--Where is Doug?--is treated with a touching urgency. Not since
Saving Private Ryan has the story of a missing comrade been laid out more engrossingly.
I have to admit, the plot necessity of bringing together disparate "types" is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, I understand that opposing character types make for more interesting interactions--characters who are too similar to each other are redundant, and when they talk, they have "conversations" not "dialogue". On the other, you wonder how the Dweeb (Stu), the Nut (Alan), and the Jock (Phil) could have become friends in real life. Among this band of Bros, it is Ed Helms who rises above the rest, reacting to every improbable twist the plot throws at him with an accessible mix of horror and giddy liberation. But really, even the clunky parts work in
The Hangover, which, at its heart, is an unapologetic, chest-bumping, warm-Budweiser-guzzling ode to the "Bros before 'hos" philosophy.