A failure

Rating: 1/10 (9 June 2013)

About the only good thing that can be said about "The Hangover part III" is that it did not repeat the error of "The Hangover part II" in rehashing a very funny story (from the original "The Hangover") whose comedic timing depended entirely on elemental shock and could offer nothing to up the ante except more raunch and more violence. The problem is that what it had to offer in this stead was completely stupid and pointless.
Alan is the foil, the deliberate but well-intentioned anti-hero of this movie, as he is in the first two movies. The difference is that the character in the first two is static, never progressing and just being his plain old dumb dangerous lovable self, hints but never express data communicated with respect to the psychiatric malaise that makes him the oaf he is. The third film attempts to transform him into a dynamic character, one who becomes conscious of the evil he does, but this time the evil is entirely unforeseen and there is no intention.
The problem is that once we understand Alan's real problem and lose the ambiguity, the original concept is retroactively destroyed and we forget all about the humor that made us fall in love with these characters in the first place. We end up just flat-out NOT CARING in the end. The simple fact is that the universe of "The Hangover" was not set up to handle the sort of drawn-out, complex emotional melodrama that this film wants to be without killing the quirky charm that made the original hit such a crisp note with so many people the world over in the first place.
A few people have suggested that simply expanding on the cliffhanger ending, which resembles the initial rising action moment in the first two films in the midst of the hangover after a Very Bad Trip (the title of the franchise in France), would have made for a more entertaining film. There are two problems with this suggestion. First of all, there is no reason to think that doing so would have ended up producing something funny, unless you are the type who thinks that Part II was on par with the original. Second, the very premise on which the scene turns depends on the climax, falling action and dénouement of Part III as it is made, so deleting this development would make such an expansion totally incomprehensible.
But as it is, the ending is problematic as an extension of Part III, because it suggests either that Alan is at fault, in which case the preceding dynamic action on his character is entirely negated, or that this happened despite and not because of him, in which case we conclude that either he or the group is cursed and that therefore nothing he does to change will ever make a difference, thereby negating any meaning of the preceding dynamic action.
Basically, to make a long story short, as is sometimes the case with great, spontaneous fiction, the creators of the first film hadn't a clue what they created, or how to handle it without breaking it. We suspected as much with Part II, and were it not for rent-seeking Hollywood speculators who by necessity line up to cash in on popular franchises, we would wonder how they could have had the shamelessness to prove as much once and for all in Part III. But even this plan seems to have backfired when Part III took in $30 million less in its opening weekend than originally expected.
And that little piece of trivia inspires me to write this little note to Los Angeles: you no longer have a quasi-monopoly on the film business, and the experience of other brands-turned-commodities (think the broadcast trio, think Kodak, think Microsoft) strongly suggests that once your commanding lead begins to fade, your share can go downhill much faster than you anticipate. The ordinary consumers who pony up for the tickets the sales of which make movies into blockbusters might well be stupid, but they're probably not as stupid as you think. Probably a good time to stop being so dismissive toward your breadbasket, huh? For example, by not re-exploiting a tired franchise.