The Hangover: Part III (2013)

It was never going to be easy to make a good sequel to The Hangover. That film worked because of a lot of stars aligning at once, and four years later many R-rated comedies have attempted to duplicate this formula and have failed miserably. The Hangover is still a good movie, but it may very well be the only good movie of its ilk. Even its own sequel, The Hangover: Part II, was unable to do anything creative with the formula of the original. In fact, the very reason it disappointed so many was because it was an almost exact duplicate of its predecessor. Perhaps that was the joke, and there were still some funny moments in there, but it simply felt like Todd Phillips pulled some leftovers out of the fridge, microwaved them, and then served them to the public.

The conclusion of this trilogy nobody asked for comes out this weekend, and the best thing that can be said about it is Phillips and his co-writer Craig Mazin actually came up with a plot that isn’t the exact same thing. Unfortunately, The Hangover: Part III is so lifeless and humorless that it makes the second installment look like an uproarious ball of energy. It feels like they produced the broad outline of the story and forgot to add any real jokes. Any humor in this film comes from the talents of the cast, and even their work doesn’t hold the same relative joy that was found in the first two movies. You can practically feel everyone involved looking at their watches between takes, waiting to just go back to their hotel rooms for the night.

Some time has passed since the events of the last two movies, and things haven’t exactly been going great for the previously lovable Alan (Zach Galifianakis). He’s been off his medication, and he is directly responsible for two fatal accidents that kick the wheels of the plot into motion. His family and friends eventually stage an intervention, and Phil (Bradley Cooper), Stu (Ed Helms) and Doug (Justin Bartha) all volunteer to drive him to a rehab facility in Arizona. They seem to be well on their way, but their trip is interrupted by the violent gangster Marshall (John Goodman), who has a personal grudge against our old crazy friend Leslie Chow (Ken Jeong). Marshall kidnaps Doug and demands that “the wolfpack” find Chow and hand him over. If they don’t do that, Doug is killed.

At that point The Hangover: Part III settles into the groove of taking our heroes from one messed-up place to another, but the sense of adventure is all but gone. I did not like Part II all in all, but my‘C+’ assessment was actually kinder than most. Despite the problems, there was still quite a bit of fun in watching the main trio of Cooper, Helms and Galifianakis stumble their way through a mystery of their own creation. There is none of that here. Things simply play out in an especially predictable way, but the ultimate sin is that the movie is just aggressively unfunny. This is less the fault of the actors than the material, which gives them absolutely nothing to work with. Again, the story here isn’t necessarily that bad. I could see it working, but here’s the thing about comedy: at some point funny things have to happen. In The Hangover: Part III, genuinely funny moments are few and far between. The cast is still able to elevate it, but only in a way that keeps it from being completely unwatchable.

If there’s one thing I appreciate about all three of these movies, it’s that Phillips and his cinematographer Lawrence Sher refuse to let the films be visually indifferent. This is a surprisingly well-shot series, and it’s especially impressive in the way they were able to take locales like Vegas and Bangkok and shoot them in a way that emphasizes the seedy underbelly. That is still the case here, and in a way it provides a nice alternative in an era when comedies look like garbage that was shot on an iPhone. The Hangover movies take pride in being movies. It doesn’t improve matters that much, but at least it gives me something to look at while sighing disinterestedly.

I like almost everyone involved with this movie. I like Helms. I like Galifianakis. I like Cooper, even though his character in these movies is a whole lot of nothing. I like Jeong. I may have my qualms with Phillips, but I think he’s a very talented director. As a writer, I’m slightly less sure. He just doesn’t quite seem to understand what people want out of a Hangover sequel. With the second film, he delivered some laughs but had nothing original in terms of story. Here, he actually put some effort into the story but forgot to add in any humor or sense of pleasure. If he combined the two, he might have had something. The Hangover: Part III is a movie that slogs through 100 minutes of nothing until it gets to the finish line, and not even a cameo from Melissa McCarthy as Alan’s potential love interest can save it. At least now we can finally put this series behind us and everyone in the cast and crew can move on to fresher and better things. They are finally free of it, and so are we.

Grade: C-