The Hangover Part III, the concluding part of the staggeringly successful series created by Todd Phillips, is an utterly misguided and almost entirely humourless affair, bereft of the set-piece laddish humour gags that has made the franchise more than a billion dollars (!) and instead turning it into some sort of crime caper movie and forced redemption tale.
The plot centres on bearded man-child Alan (Zach Galifianakis), who has become increasingly unstable since we last saw him. Having been off his medication for 6 months, the rest of the “Wolf Pack,” Phil (Bradley Cooper), Stu (Ed Helms) and Doug (Justin Bartha) decide to stage an intervention and send him to a rehab clinic in Arizona.
However, unbeknown to them ruthless drug lord Marshall (a wasted John Goodman) is on the hunt for Chow (Ken Jeong) – pain-in-the-ass troublemaker who first kidnapped Doug way back in the first movie – because of some gold he stole from him. Marshall takes Doug hostage and sets the rest of the gang the task of tracking down Chow before the time limit runs out. Chaos, bawdy hijinks and hilarity ensues.
Well, two out of three ain’t bad. Or maybe it is. This third outing, presumably (and hopefully) the last in the series, trades in big laughs, crude gags and ridiculous but still sort of believable events (stick around in the final credits if you want more of that) for weak Ocean’s Eleven-esque comedy shenanigans involving breaking into houses and a bizarre focus on darker material totally at odds with the point of the franchise. At least they address Alan’s mental state, for example, but in a series that first hinged on the broad but funny premise of a bunch of guys not being able to remember what they did last night and retracing their carnage-strewn steps, it comes off as peculiar and just plain doesn’t work. Any laughs to be found here comes from Alan, whose dumb sense of humour (the character admits as much at one point) in one-liners produces a few chuckles here and there but its sparse when it should be consistent.
Phillips and co-writer Craig Mazin make the crucial mistake of taking a key minor character, Chow, and bringing him so much into the forefront. The reason that character worked in the first place was because he was there in small doses, peppering the story rather than taking up the whole thing. The trouble here is we have him most of the time, blathering on with his annoying laugh and lewd humour that quickly becomes tiresome. Ken Jeong, very funny in other things (namely the TV series Community), must have had a lot of fun doing it but his loud and crass persona is almost insufferable after a while.
What’s perhaps most galling about The Hangover Part III is how it chucks forced emotion into its third act. As a familiar face from the first film is re-introduced, and a new face is brought into the fold (this one played by one of the new ladies of Hollywood comedy, Melissa McCarthy), it tries desperately to carve a touching two-pronged fork of emotion for Alan’s character that it never ever earns. Are the audience crying out for that sort of redemption for what is a wholly two-dimensional character? I suspect not but Part III rams it down our throats.
Who is this film even for? It won’t satisfy hardcore fans of the first two and won’t appeal to anyone else at this point, anyway. I guess there’s something to be commended in a franchise taking such a drastic left turn in its final act – it’s ultimately preferable than just hitting repeat again, something that made the last one (even if it wasn’t as bad as its reputations suggests) the disappointment that it was. However, no amount of boldness of intention can save this flat, uninteresting and most importantly unfunny Hangover-less yarn.
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