The Hangover Part III

Your eyes squint at the light, which has directed all its brightness straight at you out of pure spite. You put a hand to your head, which you are certain will explode any moment. Your stomach is a churning, roiling ocean and your throat has been lined with sandpaper. As you curl into a ball and wait for Death to take you, you moan to yourself: "What happened last night?" Then the embarrassing memories come back to you, first a trickle, then a flood.

You saw the third and final Hangover movie.

Now, you may be saying to yourself, "Waitttttttttaminute—I know what that is! That's hyperbole! UNFAIR!" But stay your hands, dear readers: you'll need far more than an Advil and a greasy breakfast to get over the latest from director Todd Philips and his cabal.

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Left to right: Ed Helms, Bradley Cooper, and Zach Galifianakis star in Warner Bros. Pictures’ and Legendary Pictures' comedy "The Hangover Part III," a Warner Bros. Pictures release.

The plot is what strays farthest from the narrow road—the flaws in the story beget flaws in the dialogue which beget flaws in the acting. When 42-year-old Adam (Zach Galifianakis) gives his father (Jeffrey Tambor) a heart attack with his unflagging refusal to move out of the house and get a life, the resulting funeral gives the "Wolfpack" a reason to reunite. Adam's family decides to put him into a treatment center, which means that the gang of groovy guys has to hit the road again. Simple enough setup for the madcap odyssey storyline that has been the basis for this whole series.

So it's puzzling when gangster Marshall (John Goodman) shows up and introduces a convoluted subplot about stolen gold bricks and escaped Asian gangster Mr. Chow (Ken Jeong). The mobster dynamic in the first film worked, but The Hangover Part III tries to build on that plot, and takes heaps of exposition to do it. Besides being boring, this changes the film—it tries harder to be a heist movie with jokes than to deliver the winning formula of the original in a new and unique way.

This crowds out the other actors, too. Ed Helms has been shifted from his "uptight nerd whose life will be ruined by the end of the night"; now he joins Bradley Cooper as straight man. This is sad. The Marx Brothers didn't need three Zippos and a Groucho—they needed variety. And Justin Bartha pops up in a few scenes, only to vanish faster than you can say "National Treasure Three."

In spite of all of this, the film could still have been okay if it had just been funnier. But this stool of a comedy rests on three uneven legs: Chow's character, Alan's character, and random acts of crudeness.

Chow is a blend of "Confucius, he say you no like man on panda" racist dialogue and a Marquis de Sade-meets-Zoolander streak of absurdity. Ken Jeong is genuinely funny, and this blend was well balanced and stole the show in the first movie. It isn't, and doesn't, in this one.

Galifianakis is a refreshing bright spot. He does his Alan absurdity thing well, especially his still-hilarious, hero-worship (bordering on the homoerotic) dynamic with Bradley Cooper.

But this brings us to the crudity.

Where to begin? Well, how about at the beginning: the opening scene involves decapitating a giraffe. Actually, the filmmakers seem to have it out for animals in general. After they off the giraffe, they execute some chickens (kept for cockfighting), break the necks of some dogs (off-screen, at least), and at one point Chow says bluntly, "What are you, PETA?" Which is followed by several unprintable expletives.

(Speaking of expletives, they swarm through this movie like cherubs in a bit-too-eager Renaissance mural.)

Now, if you saw either of the first two films, and found yourself peering through your monocle at some scene of graphic debauchery, thinking, "Dis-gust-ing!" you're not alone. The temptation to gnash teeth about the downfall of Western civilization is at times too much to resist.

It's a hard fact that we live in a world where hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of people will go out to see a movie that plays decapitating a giraffe and Ed Helms waking up with a pair of breasts for laughs. But let's not forget that this kind of thing has been around forever. From the poop jokes in Aristophanes and the innuendos in Shakespeare to the dirty poetry of the court of Charles II, vulgarity is nothing new.

Should Christians just reject this out of hand? Well, St. Paul uses a word that translates as our own vulgarity for excrement in divinely inspired Scripture (Philippians 3:8). So coarseness cannot be just rejected out of hand. Rather, the context and the purpose of the coarseness are important—and in The Hangover Part III, the shock value is there to cover up a bad movie.

The problem isn't simply that The Hangover Part III is an R-rated comedy. It's that it's a bad R-rated comedy.

But while the first one made a lot of money, it still didn't beat what The Passion of the Christ raked in. Let's clink a glass to that.

The Family Corner

Inappropriate content: More obscenities and profanities than you can possibly count, weird and disturbing violence to animals, lots of guns, female breasts, full frontal male nudity, drug use . . . Just consider yourself warned.