Todd Phillips ends his trilogy by throwing out the blackout and the morning after, and most of the jokes go with them. What remains is a crime caper with a giraffe in it, a committed Zach Galifianakis, and perhaps three laughs in 100 minutes.
Todd Phillips has said this is the end, and the poster agrees: “It all ends.” For the third film he throws out the engine of the first two, the wedding, the blackout and the morning spent working out what happened, and puts a crime story in its place. Alan (Zach Galifianakis) is off his medication, his friends drive him towards a clinic in Arizona, and a gangster called Marshall (John Goodman) stops the car. It is a brave change and it does not work. There are perhaps three real laughs in 100 minutes, and most critics have said as much.
Alan is now the whole show. Galifianakis plays him as he always has, flat, aggrieved, wounded by every ordinary request, and he is the only one of the leads who seems to believe he is in a comedy. The trouble is the dose. The script, credited to Phillips, Craig Mazin, Jon Lucas and Scott Moore, cannot settle whether Alan is a grown man with a condition we are meant to feel for or a cartoon we are meant to laugh at, and builds every scene around him regardless. Bradley Cooper and Ed Helms stand to one side saying his name in weary disbelief. Justin Bartha is taken hostage early and spends another film off screen.
Ken Jeong’s Chow is promoted to co-lead, and the film opens with his escape from a Bangkok prison, in rain, through a riot, staged as straight action. It is well made and not funny, which sets the pattern. Chow worked in small filthy doses; at this length he tires, and then, in one scene, he is something else. He sings ‘Hurt’ at a karaoke bar, badly and to the end, and the camera stays on him. We did not laugh. We felt sorry for him, which no film in this series had managed before, and then the plot resumed. Goodman plays Marshall unsmiling and patient, and would be good in a thriller.
Lawrence Sher shoots it like a thriller too, wide and clean, the desert in hard afternoon light and Las Vegas at night as a real city. The frames are handsome, and that is the problem: a comedy needs a little mess for things to go wrong in, and nothing goes wrong here that was not scheduled. Christophe Beck’s score pushes under the chases as if a bomb were ticking. Jeff Groth and Debra Neil-Fisher cut to a reaction shot and wait for the laugh, and we felt the silence each time. We were bored by the long middle, which is mostly three men in a car explaining where Chow might be.
There are two laughs we can vouch for. The first is the giraffe, which Alan has bought and is towing along the freeway when it meets a low bridge. We laughed out loud and then felt slightly grubby, because the pile-up behind it is shot as a real crash with people in it. The second is Melissa McCarthy as Cassie, a pawnbroker who meets Alan and recognises something in him. Their scene, two people sharing a lollipop as though it were a candlelit dinner, is the only one in the film where the timing is right and nobody gets hurt. Louise Mingenbach dresses them as a matched pair, cardigans and bad hair, and for once the joke is in the picture.
The rest of the cast is wasted in the ordinary way. Jeffrey Tambor is gone before he can be funny. Mike Epps returns as Black Doug for a few lines, and Heather Graham’s Jade says hello and leaves. Raj Uppal and Maher Ahmad’s production design gives the chase a string of tidy rooms, a pawnshop, a villa, a cell, none of which anyone wrecks. The film is mean where the first was merely crude, and it is not funny enough to get away with it.
The Hangover (2009) was a mystery with a hangover for an engine, and The Hangover Part II (2011) ran the same engine again in Bangkok. Phillips was right that it could not be done a third time. A chase was not the answer, because nobody here, on screen or off, cares about Marshall’s gold. Fans who have followed Alan and Chow this far will get more of both and may find that enough. Everyone else should take the tagline at its word. It all ends, and we were relieved.
