10 Surprisingly Unethical Movie Moments

The Hangover Series – Alan Garner

Who doesn’t want a Wolfpack? A small, exclusive group of people with whom you can go on holiday and reliably have a few drinks, who might laugh at you for accidentally getting your face tattooed but who will defend you against any over-controlling partner – or Russian gangster – that comes your way. People who might not agree with your dress sense, attitude or anything you say and yet will genuinely stage an intervention for your own well-being. People who won’t judge you for throwing up in public half way through a sentence and who will attend your wedding in full formal attire even if you have only known your intended spouse for an hour. People who can count cards, handle circus animals and make a joke ‘funny in any language,’ who can fashion escape ropes (out of actual knotted bed sheets), survive being shot and make their way around any city in the world on barely 10% of their regular brain function.

There is just one small price to pay for this enviable depth of loyalty and friendship. One of them has a tendency to poison his friends.

Without Alan’s famous roofie-ing of Doug, Phil and Stu during the first film, there essentially would have been no Hangover. No missing Doug, no surprise police car, no Mike Tyson (possibly ever again, in fact). no mystery baby Carlos, no endearingly psychotic Leslie Chow– none of the iconic things that made millions of people fall in slightly pitying love with these four idiots and that would eventually allow the concept to become a trilogy with an ending of weirdly dramatic proportions.

But looking at it purely from within the world of the characters themselves for a moment, there is the very plain fact that Alan secretly drugged his friends (twice, in fact – although the second time was technically an honest mistake; who doesn’t sometimes mix up which bag of marshmallows has the ADHD medication in it?). He may not have known they were roofies, but on the scale of appropriate to pretty objectionable things to do, drugging people without their knowledge generally tends to come out as a fairly definite not ok.

In fact, there is quite a lot about Alan all round that is not ok. Writer of The Hangover II, Craig Mazin, himself described Alan as malicious, pointing out that as cuddly as he may look on the outside, this is someone who will happily do things that could very well knock you out and get you raped. We might also want to remind ourselves that Alan knows how to blow up cars – and that his method involves kerosene and ferrets. No, Alan doesn’t just have the wrong end of the stick when it comes to moral principles, he has the wrong stick.

But where would the Wolfpack boys and we have been without him? How else would we all have come to know that tigers love pepper but hate cinnamon? Or that albino polar bears are black? Or that it’s not ok to steal $21 million dollars from someone on a Tuesday? Alan may be one of the most dangerous and difficult friends in all of cinema history, but there were some valuable life lessons to be learned there, I think we can all agree. Roofies all around!