Director: Todd Phillips
Talent: Zach Galifianakis, Bradley Cooper, Ed Helms, Justin Bartha
Release Date: 23rd May 2013
For the third installment in a franchise marked by cosmic unoriginality and the fortuitous comic virtuosity of Zach Galifianakis, The Hangover Part III is both exactly what you might expect and, sadly, so much less. Doing away with the retrospective narrative structure of the first two films, it is a straight men-on-a-mission caper that retreads old ground (and minor characters) while clumsily navigating the new. Galifianakis’ Alan, once an unpredictable, hilarious misfit, is now pathologised as a dangerous lunatic in need of rehabilitation—hilarity, predictably, does not stem so easily from this determination. Male bonding comedies don’t need to engage these issues, but if they do, it oughtn’t to seem this glib or condescending. Ken Jeong shines again as Chow in a film which, like its predecessors, is too weighed-down by straight-men and a weak script to do its two great character actors justice. Phillips makes use of a rich, post-Breaking Bad/Natural Born Killers colour palette, but The Hangover Part III ultimately feels half-baked, and less than the sum of its parts.
