The Hangover Part Three

About a third of the way through The Hangover Part Three, the Wolf Pack are sat in a bar in Tijuana, Mexico. It's karaoke night. Ken Jeong's Mr. Chow is at the mic, belting out a monotone rendition of Nine Inch Nail's 'Hurt'. Bradley Cooper's Phil sits at the table with a bewildered look on his face. "What the fuck am I watching?" he asks. Yeah, pretty much. The Hangover Part Three isn't funny. That's not a matter of opinion; I'm not saying that the jokes are bad, I'm saying that there aren't any. The supposedly final flick of the franchise plays out like a straight-faced action thriller with some comic relief sprinkled here and there. And if, like me, you didn't watch The Hangover and The Hangover Part Two for the action and suspense, you might, like me, be left wondering just what the fuck you're supposed to get from this.

Though the title doesn't break tradition, the premise certainly does. There's no morning after in the main plot of this instalment. Taking place a couple of years after Bangkok, Zach Galifianakis's Alan is off his medication. After he inadvertently kills his father just from the stress of having him as a forty-two year old son, the Wolf Pack stage an intervention to get him out of arrested development and into a rehab clinic in Arizona. Of course, they never get there. Along the way, they're intercepted by a van of men wearing pig masks, who run them off the road. Once they're rounded up, John Goodman's crime lord Marshall appears to inform them that Chow has stolen $21,000,000 from him and the only person who could possibly know his whereabouts is the only person he's been in contact with in the last few months: Alan. Taking Justin Bartha's Doug as collateral (of course), he gives them three days to find and deliver Chow or Doug dies. Woohoo, what a fun-filled romp this is going to be.

I'm one of the few people who thinks that The Hangover Part Two was better than the first. Though it was a carbon copy of its predecessor, I was really impressed by its pitch black humour and that at many times it seemed to be daring the audience to laugh at what was happening. In The Hangover Part Three, it's demanding that you don't. I laughed twice in this movie. The first was at an amazing dry-retching noise Stu produced, the second was a remark from Alan as the Wolf Pack were walking through a hotel lobby ("Wow, did you know this place is made out of marbles?"). Solid gold. There are multiple lengthy scenes that don't feature a single joke, existing just for exposition. Characters are killed, and it's not played for dark humour, but to raise the stakes for the protagonists. "I've never seen a person die before," Ed Helms' Stu remarks, and that's it. No follow-up, no punchline, just a group of people staggered by the cold-blooded act of violence they just witnessed. Also, though I'm not the kind of person to immediately object to animals being harmed in movies, this flick really seems to hate them. If you've seen the trailer, you know that there's an accident on the freeway involving a giraffe and an underpass. What you don't see in the trailer is the giraffe's severed head cartwheeling through the air and embedding itself in a family's windshield. That got a few nervous laughs from the audience I saw it with. Later, Alan accidentally releases some roosters Chow was feeding cocaine to for cock-fighting. After shooting one off of Stu's back, he sneaks up on another and smothers it with a pillow in a very, very lengthy shot. The audience was silent. I think I heard someone whisper, "What the fuck..." Later, when Chow kills two guard dogs even though they'd already successfully knocked them out with sedatives, the tone of the film is well established and the audience is just waiting for it to be over.

So it's obvious that this film's trying to do something tonally different. Does it succeed as a dark action thriller that's attempting to close the book on these characters? Honestly, I have no fucking clue. I spent so much of the movie's runtime just trying to reconcile what it was that I never really got a chance to sit back and take it all in. From a technical perspective at least, it's well done. The chase scene through the desert with the pig men features some brilliant cinematography, combining Extreme Wide Shots and Reverse Point of View Shots to really get as much out of the landscape as possible. There are also some compelling action set-pieces, examples being a tense descent of about twenty feet from a roof to a balcony using bed sheets and the subsequent cat and mouse game played in a hotel room with a flashing white strobe light. Here's the thing, though: I don't want to presume what the audience wants, I can only speak for myself, but I feel alienated by this movie. There's a scene in which Alan is reunited with baby Carlos from the first movie, who is actually named Tyler, and is now four. "Are you my real dad?" Tyler asks. "...Yes," Alan replies. It's kind of sweet, but once again it's not played for laughs, but to highlight just how damaged Alan is and how a significant change to his lifestyle and personality is needed if he's ever to finally become an adult. One might be inclined to say it belongs in another movie, if the rest of the movie wasn't too so out of left field. It all...works, but it's just so fundamentally removed from what came before it that one mightn't be able to help but look upon it as a failure.

I have a theory about The Hangover Part Three. Note that it's just a theory, just an opinion, but I think one of two things happened with the production of this flick. The first is that Todd Phillips genuinely took on board the criticism that The Hangover Part Two stuck too rigidly to the formula of the first and made a film that went in an entirely new direction in hopes that it would deliver a fresh encounter with these characters that also concluded our time with them in a meaningful way. The premise is far darker and straight-faced, but there are certainly still some decent moments of clever dialogue between Alan, Phil and Stu, and the soundtrack once again brings back the Danzig, Kanye West and obscure classics that we all love and expect to hear. The whole thing doesn't really work in the end, but at least he gave it a shot. Here's the second theory: Todd Phillips didn't want to make this movie. He was potentially bitter about the criticism received for Part Two, or potentially just sick of the franchise, but he was under pressure (read: compensated significantly) from Warner Brothers to bring in another box office hit. So he made a movie that would ensure he'd never be asked to do another. If that's the case, perhaps the movie should have been advertised a little differently. I did up a concept.