Glory days over for Hangover III.
Hangover Part III can’t quite recapture glory days of original
If there’s one thing I learned in journalism school, it’s that one hangover is one too many. (OK, I also learned to always double-check your math, especially when buying pints.)
But director Todd Phillips keeps going back to the well, to the point where his eightfeature oeuvre now consists of 37.5 percent Hangover movies. Don’t worry; I double-checked that.
The first two followed the same basic pattern. Four unlikely buddies have lost one of their friends in situations they can no longer clearly recall, and have to get him back. They are mild-mannered Doug (Justin Bartha), tightly wound dentist Stu (Ed Helms), man-child Alan (Zach Galifianakis) and Phil (Bradley Cooper), alpha male of this wolf pack.
The good news about Part III is that it makes a few modifications to the formula. Sure, there are still inexplicable numbers of Billy Joel songs on the soundtrack; animals are abused; people are killed (but no one we care about); and Galifianakis proves himself master of the malaprop.
But this time co-writers Phillips and Craig Mazin (Identity Thief) ditch the substanceabuse/amnesia angle in favour of a more straight-up plot device: Extortion.
A criminal kingpin named Marshall (John Goodman, who can bluster with the best of them) kidnaps Doug and holds him hostage until his friends can track down the flaky Leslie Chow (Ken Jeong), who stole $21 million in gold that Marshall had just stolen for himself.
Why pick on these four shmoes? Chow just escaped from prison using a scheme cobbled together from The Shawshank Redemption and The Fugitive, which at least proves that someone out there is watching good movies. And when he was inside, he corresponded with Alan. The wolf pack of my enemy’s pen pal is my enemy, or something like that.
What follows is a trip to Tijuana, real-life angry birds, a burglary with a surprising twist, and a climax in Las Vegas because, in this series, all roads lead there. Also, a lot of gunplay and bad driving that goes remarkably unnoticed by either passersby or police.
Parts of it are very funny, although if you’ve seen the giraffe gag in the trailers, you’ll find it plays a little slow in the actual movie. (Also, it’s never a good sign to have a character announce: “I thought that was pretty funny.”) There’s a scene where Alan pees himself, but it’s not from laughing, and you’ll be in no danger of being similarly embarrassed.
Still, the humour gets nicely goosed by Jeong’s extended screen time. Chow lives for the moment, takes no prisoners and tends to burn his bridges before he gets to them, so you never know what fresh insanity he’ll concoct. In the previous Hangovers that’s been the purview of Galifianakis. In this one there’s a kind of anti-logic, a shouldn’t-work-but-doesness, to having two main characters who are clearly off their rockers.
All in all, Hangover III outclasses Hangover II, which was essentially a pale copy of Hangover I. But the wolf pack is getting grey, and any character development sputtered out at least half a movie ago. Props to Phillips for trying to recapture the glory days, but he should realize that you never forget your first, and you seldom surpass it.