What a disappointment. And the weed wasn’t all that good either. Straight up I thought The Hangover was one of the funniest comedies of the last ten years. A great gimmick, awesome performances and tight, sharp jokes made it a pleasure. The Hangover Part 2 was less impressive – it felt like one of those mid-season TV episodes where the cast travels somewhere else but just runs through the same old jazz. The third (and allegedly final) installment was supposed to bring the boys back to Vegas, ditching the “forgotten night” concept for fresh laughs.
It didn’t work. The Hangover Part 3 is lame. There are a few moments where you’ll laugh really hard, but they’re few and far between. For most of the movie I just sat there waiting for them to get on with it already, which is not the feeling you want from a comedy. The first one was like Space Mountain at Disneyland. This one’s like the bumper cars at your county fair, only there’s nobody in any of the other cars.
The problem with this movie is something I like to call “Urkel Syndrome.” When we just saw Urkel every once in a while on Family Matters, he was tolerable. But when more and more episodes started being all about Urkel, the show went right down the toilet. Ken Jeong’s Mr. Chow is the Urkel of this movie. In the first flick, he acted as punctuation – his naked jump out of the trunk was one of the flick’s unforgettable water-cooler moments. The second film used him even more, and Part 3 is all Chow, all the time. And it’s just too much.
The plot is nonsense – stolen gold, John Goodman, rehab – but that shouldn’t matter. It’s just a framework to put the three dudes in increasingly desperate situations. The problem with this movie is that it’s not really “the three dudes.” It’s Alan, and Chow, with little dribs and drabs of Phil and Stu, who have been reduced to background players. Bradley Cooper and Ed Helms are both just obviously cashing checks here, as neither seems to give a damn about anything in the movie. And why should they? It’s a dumb movie.
Listen, I’m happy that The Hangover made Zach Galifianakis a star. That was a really cool thing to do (despite all the moronic Twitter fake Alan joke accounts). But everybody involved should have moved on before this movie happened. Can we do that now?
Disclaimer: I fixed all the typos and grammar errors but left all the other dumb stuff in.