It was with great reluctance that I handed over my £7.65 to the cashier on the ticket desk at the Odeon. You see, I didn’t want to go and see Hangover Part III. The problem was, no-one else wanted to go either. So in the name of Cherwell, I bravely hoicked my feminist tote bag onto my shoulder, bought a ticket and stumbled out of the sunlight into screen five.
In a marked change from the first two films, this instalment does not feature a stag do. In fact, rather audaciously, it doesn’t even feature a hangover. Instead, the Wolfpack begin by staging an intervention for Alan (or the beard one, as I called him in my head). On their way to drop him off at a rehabilitation centre, their car is hijacked by gangsters. It turns out that their former acquaintance Leslie Chow has stolen millions of dollars worth of gold. Doug (the boring one) is taken hostage until his three friends track down Chow and bring him to the chief mobster.
What ensues is essentially a series of far-fetched set pieces with no overall feeling of unity. The trio travel to Mexico. They break into a house. They abseil down Caesar’s Palace in Vegas. There may be an almost total lack of female characters, but there are plenty of guns, plenty of sedatives and oh-so-much driving. It seemed like we couldn’t go five minutes without another tedious, wide-panning shot of a highway.
Hangover Part III seemed to be working mainly on the premise that comedy involving the gratuitous abuse of animals is utterly hilar. Within the first few minutes, a giraffe was decapitated by a motorway bridge. In the next hour or so, we witnessed the extended smothering of a rooster with a pillow and the drugging of two guard dogs. When Stu (the dentist one) protests, he is mocked: ‘Oh I’m sorry, I didn’t know you worked for PETA? What a pussy.’ Mercifully, we are told rather than shown that their throats are later slashed.
And when it’s not riffing off animal cruelty, Hangover is content to rely on the mental instability of Chinese hustler, Chow. Flirtatious, sociopathic, crippled by loneliness and obsessed with cocaine, Chow is the ultimate other. His craziness becomes the subject of easy gags that veer towards the downright uncomfortable.
At one point, the film took a turn for the menacing. Chow is locked in the boot, and the trio are driving him into the desert to be shot. He pleads with them, telling them they’ll have his blood on their hands. In that moment, I desperately wanted Hangover to ditch the second-rate jokes and get deadly serious. Wouldn’t it be great, I thought, if the whole Wolfpack just got annihilated now? Or if Phil (the cool one) could realise his tragic fall and join the international drug cartel. What a brilliant, dark end that would be. Sadly, it was not the ending I was going to get.
In an effort to erase Hangover Part III’s gaping flaws from my mind, I spent most of the film thinking about how much I would like to eat Bradley Cooper. And then I felt bad about wanting to eat Bradley Cooper and tried to think of him as more than just a sex object. Cooper has come a long way since the first Hangover movie, and to be frank, he looked bored to be there. ‘I told myself I would never come back,’ says Stu-dental when the trio arrive in Vegas. ‘Don’t worry,’ replies Cooper, ‘it all ends tonight.’ As he stands around in his mirrored sunglasses, you get the feeling he’s been waiting for it to end for a while.
I got the impression from my fellow cinemagoers that Hangover Part III was not as gleefully debauched as its predecessors. It was plenty debauched enough for me. Personally, I can’t wait for Hangover IV, where the Wolfpack battle with the acute post-traumatic stress disorder that stems from the multiple violent deaths they witness in this movie. Now that’s a film I’d happily pay to see.
