Simply put, "The Hangover" is sick and wrong.

This comedy features some of the most irresponsible and reprehensible behavior by characters ever in a movie. That includes the mistreatment of a child.

If you can get past that — and there are a lot of audiences that won't be able to — the film is actually very funny. Though, given how sick and wrong it is, you may feel a little guilty for laughing.

That said, you get the feeling that this film might catch on in the same way that the similarly outrageous hits "The Wedding Crashers" and "The 40-Year-Old Virgin" did four years ago.

The title refers to the physical state of three members of a bachelor party — Phil Wenneck (Bradley Cooper), Stu Price (Ed Helms) and Alan Garner (Zach Galifianakis).

All three have been on a bender to end all benders, and they've woken up in Las Vegas with no memory of what happened to them.

Stu is missing a tooth. Phil apparently spent time in an emergency room. There's a tiger in the bathroom. And there's a baby in the closet.

Worse, they've "lost" the fourth member of their party — the bachelor, Doug Billings (Justin Bartha).

So they try to retrace their steps. And they hope to find Doug and get out of there without doing themselves any more damage.

The studio clearly has confidence in this film and this material. They've already given the screenwriters and director Todd Phillips the go-ahead for a sequel.

But as goofy and strange as the situations become, we wouldn't have any investment in this sometimes distasteful silliness if we didn't like these guys.

Cooper and Helms — who performs an original musical composition at one point — are very believable and surprisingly sympathetic lunkheads.

The film's breakout star is the hirsute Galifianakis, who gets most of the best and most bizarre lines. (A "Rain Man" homage involving his character is very amusing.)

"The Hangover" is rated R and features strong sexual language (profanity, vulgar slang terms and other suggestive talk), crude humor, most of it sexual (sight gags and references), mostly comic violence (fisticuffs, vehicular mayhem, animal violence and strong child-in-peril elements), drug content and references (the so-called "date rape" drug), female and full male nudity, derogatory language and slurs (some involving obesity), simulated sex and other sexual contact, and brief gore and blood. Running time: 100 minutes.

E-mail: jeff@desnews.com