A dark and unfunny conclusion to the adventures of the Wolf Pack which makes for an unsatisfying end and seems to lose sight of what made the original film so good.

After he accidentally decapitates a giraffe on the freeway, Allen (Zach Galifianakis) slips further into whatever the hell is wrong with him after he goes off meds and the resultant stress gives his father (Jeffrey Tambor) a heart attack. Following his bizarre behavior during the funeral, his friends and family stage an intervention. This leads Phil (Bradley Cooper), Doug (Justin Bartha) and Stu (Ed Helms) to drive him to New Directions in Phoenix, AZ. The trip ends pretty quickly when Marshall (John Goodman) and Black Doug (Mike Epps) run them off the road and kidnap (white) Doug in order to force them to find and capture Leslie Chow (Ken Jeong) for him. And all manner of not so wackiness ensues.

I loved the first Hangover and I was one of the very few who liked the second as well so I really wanted to like this one as well. Director Todd Philips is a favorite of mine and I usually plug into his brand of comedy perfectly so it was a pretty big shock to me just how much of a misfire this film is. That is not to say that there are no laughs in this film but they are few and far between and none rate above a chuckle. Given how subjective comedy is, I feel it is important to qualify that Philips’s films in general and this series in particular is right up my alley and my sense of humor definitely skews to the dark and offense end of the spectrum pretty far.

The above caveat is to put into context what it means when I say that the Hangover Part III is way too dark and the attempts at comedy are needlessly mean spirited and cruel. Alan has gone from being lovably quirky and weird to being a massive dick and Leslie Chow, funny in small doses, is way over utilized here. The character has always been been a twisted asshole but the rampant animal cruelty (read: killing) and near constant yammering of nonsense really starts to grate on the nerves.

And that is really all that the movie has going on. The jokes are based off of Alan being a dick or Chow being a sadistic dick. Stu and Phil are left to just constantly shout ‘what the fuck!?!’ every time something messed up happens. And lots of messed up things happen it is just that none of them are particularly funny and some are downright disturbing.

I think a lot of this has to do with the backlash from the second movie and the complaint that it was essentially just a carbon copy of the first movie with a change of venue and a different animal. While it is true that Part II was exactly that, I enjoyed it because there were still funny jokes and I liked the characters. Spending time with those three characters was fun and I didn’t mind the rehash so much. Now, however, there is a huge over correction in which Philips has tried to swing the movie into something totally different but in doing so has changed the characters fundamentally and the comedy that stems from them is weakened and altered. There has to be a middle ground between complete rehash and complete reinvention but this certainly isn’t it.

Part of this is situational too. The situations the characters find themselves in are not particularly interesting and don’t hold the same intrinsic comedy that the situations from the previous films had. This sort of a nebulous complaint but the situations presented here just fall flat and the attempts at jokes miss the mark much more than they hit. Add to this rampant animal killing and general nastiness from Alan and some of the surrounding characters and it makes more a movie that left me frowning which is worse than just leaving me straight faced.

The performances are generally flat and rarely retain any of the spark that they had in the first movie. Galifianakis retains a particular twinkle in his eye and it is almost enough to dismiss Alan being such an ass as the results of being off his meds but it doesn’t make it any more enjoyable to watch. Bradley Cooper and Ed Helms, both actors I absolutely love, are completely wasted here and spend their time serving the plot and rarely being allowed to serve the comedy. Ken Jeong is another actor I really love but his performance here is infuriatingly grating. I am not sure that it is his fault as much as it is an over saturation of the character but either way he should not have had this much screen time nor been the focal point of so much of the comedy. John Goodman plays the heavy pretty well but I don’t really understand using a man of his talent for a one note villain who doesn’t do much beyond murdering people.

Conclusion [4.0 out of 10]

The more I have thought about this movie after seeing it the more I dislike it particularly when I consider that I can remember only two genuinely funny moments. It breaks my heart how much I didn’t like this and I really wanted it to be better. All that being said, your mileage may vary depending on what you think is funny but I really don’t think there is much to love here regardless of sense of humor. If you want a good primer on how to waste talent, this movie serves pretty well.