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The Hangover Part III

Warner Bros
What it's about:

This time, there's no wedding. No bachelor party. What could go wrong, right? But when the Wolfpack hits the road, all bets are off.

What we thought:

Having read a number of overseas reviews for The Hangover Part III, most of them negative, I went into this film's screening with pretty low expectations.

What I got was a film that was hardly as bad as I'd initially expected. I guess that's low expectations for you: Go in expecting the worst and you'll get "not quite as bad".

This third film comes riding on the coattails of a series of that was generally thought of as comedic, which is odd, given that this film has more action than it does comedy.

Where to begin? The Wolfpack (a title which once made me grin and now makes me grimace) are taking Alan to a clinic in Arizona in the hopes that this will help him to finally get past his many deficiencies (this following an especially gruesome incident involving a baby giraffe and a bridge, followed then by the passing of Alan's father).

However, before they can get to their destination, they are kidnapped by Marshall (John Goodman, who deserves all our sympathies), who takes their friend Doug hostage and forces the remaining members of The Wolfpack to find Chow, who has stolen $20 million worth of Marshall's gold.

That sounds like a crime movie but I'm fairly certain that The Hangover Part III was intended to be a comedy. Given the franchise's previous films and the manner of acting on display, it would seem that this is the case. And yet, barring the odd chuckle here and there, the film seems oddly bereft of much in the way of comedy though there is quite a bit of spectacle such as car chases and a prison breakout.

Not that this sort of comedy can't work. In the hands of, say, the Coen brothers, this kind of offbeat, goofy mayhem can be great fun. Unfortunately, with Todd Philips at the helm, the film stumbles from one thing to the next, it's humour largely one-note and generating only the occasional laugh. Some of it is pretty nasty (the aforementioned giraffe incident comes to mind).

It would help if any of the performances contained some charm or otherwise appeal to win us over, but no; the acting is, by and large, charmless. Galifianakis is downright grating in fact. He may have had a child-like appeal about him in the first film, but here he's just annoying.

Cooper, the main draw for many, gives the impression that he'd rather be elsewhere and that he'd like to get there as soon as possible, while Helms comes off strongest but that isn't saying much. Poor Justin Bartha is relegated to the role of MacGuffin with nothing else given for his character to do and I'm not sure what Ken Jeong is doing but it has the faint stench of racism from the 1950s.

At the end of the film, I checked the time, certain that over two hours had passed since the lights had gone down. As it turned out, the film had only run for just over ninety minutes.

Hopefully, this film will be like most hangovers. The filmmakers and the audience, having gone through such a trying experience, will say "Never again. That's the last time I'll ever do that. I'm never doing that ever again."

And they'll mean it.

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