No hangover, no laughs, no point.

Rating: 2/10 (5 June 2013)

I attempted to clean my brain out after the dire waste of life that was The Moth Diaries. Only humour would help.
Alas, humour was in very short supply in The Hangover Part III.
So were hangovers, for that matter, but perhaps that's just being picky when there are so many other issues to be riled about. However, I don't care. I lost the will to live, or at least explain my life, somewhere after the tenth minute. This turgid film follows the law of diminishing returns.
The Hangover (2009) was inventive and funny; a true sleeper hit that took the world by storm and entertained enormously.
The Hangover Part II (2011) was crass.
The Hangover Part III is just crap.
This time round Doug (Justin Bartha), Phil (Bradley Cooper) and Stu (Ed Helms) take Alan (Zach Galifianakis) on a road trip to the funny farm as he's losing the plot. And not in a funny way. Rather than being more eccentric, more extreme and more bizarre, Alan is just unpleasant. And, no, that's not funny either. Along the way they get dragged into Marshall's (John Goodman) underworld and must locate his missing millions and the equally missing Mr. Chow (Ken Jeong).
Oh, and Jeong gets his willy out again just so we can be sure it really is that tiny. How I split my sides...
That's pretty much it. The plot of The Hangover Part III is as thin as Patrick Stewart's hair and only marginally more amusing. It never goes anywhere (the plot, not Stewart's hair), revisits old scenes, squeezes in the characters and situations it feels obliged to and bumbles along until the end wanders in from the wings and plonks itself down in front of us.
Rather than give us something new, writer/director Todd Phillips prefers to stick with feeble tradition and dispense with Doug early on. He then rolls in Heather Graham, as Jade, again but forgets that she is a funny and engaging actress and squanders the opportunity to brighten up his dull thud of a film.
To be fair, the obligatory post-film credit scene raised a smile but we shouldn't have to wait 90-odd minutes for the first real bout of humour. The funniest sequences in the actual film (i.e. the bits I smiled at) are in the trailer and were far funnier for being shorter: Alan singing at his father's funeral (dealt with in the first five minutes) and the decapitation of the giraffe (tragically over-egged in the film) both worked far better in their severely edited form.
Todd clearly has yet to learn that less is more. But that's pretty much the way it runs in The Hangover Part III. At least it doesn't have the racist undertones of the second installment.
Take it from me, if you've seen the trailer of The Hangover Part III, you've seen just about everything worthwhile. Save the price of your ticket, buy some beer and watch the original The Hangover again instead.
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