belated review: The Hangover Part III

It’s difficult, if not impossible, to think of any other film series that has declined in quality so completely and so rapidly as the “Hangover” trilogy.

I’ve gone on record with my opinion that the first movie was one of the funniest and best written comedies of all time. The second movie tried too hard to duplicate the first film’s success. There were some laughs, but the quality suffered from the distracting, unoriginal attempt to be such a carbon copy that even the characters themselves occasionally commented on the familiarity of it all. The filmmakers vowed that they had learned their lesson, and promised that the next movie would break from the formula.

And so we have the admittedly very different “Hangover Part III,” which is the worst movie I’ve seen in a long time. It’s completely devoid of laughs, and just plain unpleasant.

The third film devotes a lot of time to the character of Leslie Chow, the eccentric criminal played by Ken Jeong, who played a relatively small supporting role in the first two films. Here, he has enough screen time to qualify as a co-star, but that’s not a good idea. He was hilarious in the first movie, utilitarian in the second, and here demonstrates that he’s best served in small doses. The movie starts with Chow breaking out of prison, in scenes that deliberately recall both The Fugitive and The Shawshank Redemption, but in a manner that screams "rip-off" more than "homage." Apparently, yes, you can tell the difference.

The movie's over-dependence on Chow is the first most obvious error in judgment made by the filmmakers. He throws insults at everybody, he goes back and forth between villain and friend, he even sings karaoke, and I kept waiting for him to do something funny. I finally realized that the filmmakers thought they were being funny. In their minds, just the sight of Chow singing karaoke, for example, is supposed to be funny. That shows a gross misunderstanding of comedy. The mere sight of somebody doing something mundane is rarely funny. Make him a particularly bad singer, or a particularly good singer, or let him get the words wrong, or do something, anything to let us know that the writers are at least trying. Nope. He just . . . sings. Honestly, it got to the point where I was starting to feel embarrassed for Jeong.

The second most obvious error in judgment: an over-reliance on Alan, the wackiest member of the "Wolf Pack" group of friends at the center of the three films. In the first two movies, Alan was one of three buddies on madcap adventures. Here, he's almost the whole show. In terms of screen time, Bradley Cooper and Ed Helms may technically be Zach Galifinakis's equals, but there's no arguing that this time around, it's not about the three of them. It's all about Alan, with Phil and Stu relegated to playing straight men/ supporting characters, whose sole role is to watch Alan do crazy stuff. For Cooper and Helms, accepting roles in this movie was obviously a strictly "in it for the paycheck" decision.

What's worse than the mere over-reliance on Alan, is that the writers (Craig Mazin and Todd Phillips) have strayed far from the character created by the writers of the first film. In the first two movies, Alan was dumb and maybe just a little crazy, but there was an undeniable sweetness not too far underneath it all. He cared deeply about being loved, and desperately wanted his friends to have a good time. Even when he did dumb things, you could at least understand why he did them. Here's he's borderline insane -- and in many scenes, outright mean-spirited. He's got some arguably funny lines, but he's so damn crazy and nasty, that he's too unlikable this time around to be truly funny. The movie justifies this change by explaining "he's off his meds," a central plot point of the story. But whose idea was it to say, "hey, let's make this guy completely unlikable, and then make his acts of cruelty and stupidity the center of every scene"?

John Goodman would seem a good fit for this universe, but here, he's wasted in a villainous role. He's constantly angry, shouting at everybody with such bile that it's uncomfortable to sit through his scenes. Watching Goodman in The Hangover Part III, you constantly feel like both Goodman himself and the writers completely forgot this is supposed to be a comedy. Like Alan, like Chow, and like the movie itself, Goodman's character is far too mean-spirited to be anything close to funny. What a waste of time this movie turned out to be.