No one expects the writers of The Hangover to lay out a light touch with race and gender, but Jon Lucas and Scott Moore's collegiate romp is disturbingly tone-deaf about two topics that should never be packaged with dick jokes: gun violence and suicide. Visiting Jeff Chang (Justin Chon), the high-school pal they always address by full name, boorish white boys Miller (Miles Teller) and Casey (Skylar Astin) are hellbent on getting their tightly wound buddy wasted — even though he has a huge med-school interview the next morning. A string of booze-fueled sequences spliced with all the expected cracks about math prowess and overbearing Asian dads (Lost's Francois Chau) seems like a predictable enough formula for what unfolds, but then Lucas and Moore surprise us. Miller and Casey's gradual realization that Jeff is not the cleancut, straight-A student they always knew him to be is their attempt at bringing a friends-forever moral to the beer-pong table, but it's botched so badly that it taints every boys-will-be-boys moment. Sneaking into a sorority house? Fine, that's funny. On-campus firearms and hidden attempts to off oneself are not.
