The Hangover: Part III | Review
The Wolfpack returns in this third, and supposedly (hopefully) final installment. This time, there’s no wedding, there’s no bachelor party, but of course things still go wrong.
The Wolfpack are on the road to bring Alan (Zach Galifianakis) to rehab when they suddenly run into Marshall (John Goodman), a big mob boss who’s looking for Leslie Chow (Ken Jeong) for stealing $23 million from him. Marshall takes Doug as collateral (of course) and gives the rest of the wolfpack a short deadline to find and capture Chow.
If you couldn’t tell yet, Part III is drastically different from the first two Hangover films. The first film had the group blacking out and remembering nothing from the previous night, thus forced to backtrack their actions. The second film was pretty much a beat-for-beat remake of the original rather than a true sequel. This third film is thankfully a change of pace, even if it does lead to less laughs than the previous films. Part III actually feels darker and more serious in tone than the others (this installment includes the trilogy’s first on-screen character death!) and less like a comedy. However, I must admit there ARE plenty of laughs throughout.
This film also focuses more on Alan and Chow and less on Stu (Ed Helms) and Phil (Bradley Cooper). This is both a good and a bad thing because it expands on Alan’s character and, by the end of the film, he evolves as a person. Chow has quiet a few hilarious moments that keeps the film’s humor going. The great chemistry with the rest of the wolfpack (Stu and Phil) is unfortunately underplayed this time because they have less to do than before.
John Goodman is perfectly hammy as the primary antagonist Marshall. I appreciated the callbacks to the original film, like Black Doug (Mike Epps) and Jade (Heather Graham). Also, the female characters aren’t completely thrown away and made stupid this time around. Jade returns with a completed character arc, and the hilarious Melissa McCarthy even shows up for a brief period for some added fun.
In the end, The Hangover Part III is not as consistently funny or outrageous as the previous two, but it is a more mature and fitting conclusion for the trilogy.
PS: There’s a funny tongue-in-cheek bonus scene in the middle of the credits.