The Hangover Part III

At the end of The Hangover, if I told you to get ready for the Chow movie, you would have been more excited than an IRS agent driving up to Tea Party headquarters on April 15. And, you’d be wrong.

As The Hangover Part III opens, Alan (Zach Galifianakis) is going through some tough times. Still mentally imbalanced, and even crazier and inappropriate than usual because he stopped taking his meds, his friends and family are getting worried about him.

They decide to stage an intervention to make the bearded man-child confront his troubles and agree to go to a mental health facility in Arizona. Of course, Alan says he will only go if The Wolfpack takes him. With that, Doug (Justin Bartha), Phil (Bradley Cooper) and Stu (Ed Helms) are piling into the family minivan to make that road trip.

Along the way, they are kidnapped! Mr. Chow (Ken Jeong) has broken out of his Bangkok prison, and an old nemesis, Marshall (John Goodman), thinks The Wolfpack is the key to finding him. Marshall and his thugs take Doug as collateral (he never gets to participate in the fun), and tell the other three they have to find Mr. Chow, or else.

Where is Chow?

Why does Marshall want revenge?

Can The Wolfpack survive this road trip?

More importantly, can the audience survive this movie?

What always made The Hangover movies interesting and funny was how outrageous they were. This movie feels like it is on some meds. Maybe Ambien.

Believe me when I tell you that almost all of the scenes you have watched in commercials and trailers happen in the first 10 – 15 minutes of The Hangover Part III, and that’s not a good thing.

Somewhere along the line, writer/director Todd Phillips and co-writer Craig Mazin lost the mojo and irreverence we enjoyed so much in the first two (even if you hated The Hangover Part II, it did have some good moments, more than this movie has). Galifianakis is pulling every silly trick he can out of his bag to make us laugh at material that isn’t very funny and interesting, while Cooper and Helms are reduced to onlookers for most of the film.

Phillips seems intent on angering PETA as much as possible by portraying some horribly unfortunate and violent acts against animals for laughs, which go beyond being naughty and enter distasteful territory. This is the same cast that united out of a moral obligation to stop Mel Gibson from making a cameo in The Hangover Part II, but they were OK with this stuff?

We are left with a lifeless, flat movie struggling to move the plot forward, even if it feels like that plots was made up as they go along. The kinship among the guys is barely there as we revisit characters and places that we liked so much in the first two movies, but feel out of place and included out of some admirable, but misplaced loyalty here.

The Hangover Part III ultimately is too contrived. It would be ridiculous to come up with another scenario like the first two movies where the guys are awakening from an insane night with no memory, but this movie does lack the zaniness the other two had. It progresses at a slow, plodding pace with nothing all that outrageous happening.

Almost like an apology, Phillips delivers a scene during the credits that is 100 times funnier than the rest of the movie, so maybe you can sneak into the back of a theater and catch that when you are exiting Iron Man 3.

The Hangover Part III is rated R for pervasive language including sexual references, some violence and drug content, and brief graphic nudity.