Movie Review: The Hangover Part III (2013)
Posted By Dave Howlett on May 23, 2013
Blame it all on Tony Stark. The 2013 summer movie season kicked off so strongly with Iron Man 3, the bar was set pretty high for blockbusters in general and sequels in particular. Granted, after an insultingly lazy second installment, the raunchy Hangover series had nowhere to go but up, and this third and allegedly final chapter in Todd Phillips’ salute to bad behaviour and its inevitable consequences is a slight improvement. But where 2011′s The Hangover Part II was content to retrace the steps of the 2009 original a little too closely, The Hangover Part III seems determined to wander away from the familiar setup. Even so, it all still feels a little too familiar.
The Hangover Part III begins as Alan (Zach Galifianakis) is spiraling out of control into increasingly bizarre activity, having been off his meds for months. After the sudden heart-attack death of his father (who Alan refers to in a eulogy as his “life partner”), it seems that Alan may be beyond salvage, at least until the members of “The Wolfpack”—cool-guy Phil (Bradley Cooper), straight-laced Stu (Ed Helms), and perpetual living, breathing MacGuffin Doug (Justin Bartha) agree to accompany Alan to a rehab clinic in Arizona. However, they’re waylaid en route by a gang of pig-masked thugs led by drug kingpin Marshall (John Goodman, seemingly everywhere these days) who kidnap Doug (of course) and promise to return him only if the guys can deliver diminutive crime lord Lesley Chow (Ken Jeong), who Alan has been secret pen pals with since the second movie’s Bangkok escapade. The quest to capture Chow leads first to Tijuana, then finally back once again to Las Vegas for a final showdown.
There isn’t much for anyone to really do in these movies anymore, from a character development point of view at least. Phil and Stu finished their narrative arcs way back in the first film—Phil realized that the debauched lifestyle he craved was no substitute for the domestic bliss he already had, and Stu freed himself from his abusive harpy of a fiancée so he could be happily married to Jamie Chung’s Lauren by the end of Part II. As such, they act out familiar patterns in scene after scene, and look pretty bored doing so. This is Alan’s movie, though, and it does successfully humanize the series’ wild card a bit, first through his grief at his father’s demise and later through his reunion with a now-four-year-old Baby Carlos from Part I. He even gets a shot at romance with a purple-haired pawn shop clerk played by Melissa McCarthy. The movie doesn’t really come alive until the crew returns to Vegas, the high point of which is a dizzying insertion into a top-level balcony at Caesar’s Palace. This element of actual danger was one of the elements that made the first Hangover work so well; this installment even has a body count–at least four humans, a giraffe, and a handful of fighting roosters bite the dust before the credits roll. Phillips once again proves himself a visually shrewd director with an impressive grasp of film vocabulary (he references both The Shawshank Redemption and Midnight Cowboy early on). But like every Die Hard movie after the first, there’s no way these particular circumstances would keep lining up to provide an avenue for these kinds of misadventures. Phillips and his co-writer Craig Mazin seem to realize this, and they’ve opted to break up the usual structure a bit. The actual hangover itself isn’t the setup but rather the punchline this time around, an over-the-top end credits zinger that appears to double as an everything-must-go clearing house of craziness. Seeing as how Phillips and company have promised that this Hangover is the last, let’s hope this means they’ve gotten it all out of their system.
Comments
Leave a Reply
Please note: Comment moderation is currently enabled so there will be a delay between when you post your comment and when it shows up. Patience is a virtue; there is no need to re-submit your comment.