There is no facility that can fix this guy.

The Hangover Part III

(2013)

While it made a huge wad of cash, the second Hangover movie roundly took a beating from critics (and had a mixed reception from audiences). It was virtually the same as the first one, they decried. Presumably Todd Phillips was listening, which is why he eschews the (surely essential?) memory-defective structure in favour of something more linear. And more run-of-the-mill. The response wasn’t good; it took $200m less than its predecessor worldwide. And I can quite see why. Part III may not be a terrible movie but crucially neither is it a terribly funny one.

For my part, I rather like Part II. I’m not sure why rehashing the premise of the original was considered such a cardinal crime (since most sequels are guilty of the same), and the picture zips along crudely and colourfully. I was unconcerned that the characters weren’t likable; my only demand was for the film to be funny, which it was. So the complaints about the general air of unpleasantness and misanthropy were rather lost on me. It seemed no more offensive than the average US R-rated comedy, and the unsympathetic nature of the Wolf Pack (Alan – Zach Galifianakis, Phil – Bradley Cooper, and Stu – Ed Helms) felt more like a debauched spin on the “learn nothing” premise of Seinfeld than a portend of the downfall of western civilisation.

Part III, shorn of its morning-after set up, has to cast about for another motor to drive its plot. So Phillips and co-writer Craig Mazin turn to perceived audience favourite Mr Chow (Ken Jeong). He busts out of a Thai prison, and goes to ground. Crime lord Marshall (John Goodman) is out to get even with Chow, and demands that the Wolf Pack track him down. Doug (Justin Bartha) is held hostage as leverage (so keeping Bartha off screen for most of the movie is retained at least).

Chow’s role in Part II was beefed up, and here he is virtually a fourth member of the Pack. Unfortunately Chow requires decent scenarios if he’s not to become merely a shrill annoyance. There are occasional moments (singing Johnny Cash’s version of Hurt, screaming “I love cocaine” while paragliding, and a cut to him gleefully exclaiming “I’m out of my fucking mind”, just after the Wolf Pack have observed the same thing).

Galifianakis’ shtick is wearing a bit thin by this point also, and his attempts at humour fall mostly flat. Which sort of works in terms of the film’s bleak starting position (following the giraffe incident seen in the trailer, and his father’s death, an intervention is staged; the plan is to take Alan to a rehab facility). But the gags he is given are just lousy (he has a beautiful singing voice). It’s only when Alan meets Cassie (Melissa McCarthy) that Phillips and Mazin find something distinctive for the beardy-weirdy to do, even if the of whacky peas-in-a-pod soul mates subplot is desperately unoriginal.

Cooper and Helms barely register, with the latter’s antagonism towards Alan soon dropped (likewise, the theme that they don’t even really give a shit about Alan seems to have been forgotten by time of the end credits sequence). The former spends his time looking studly and not much else. The attempt to evoke the spirit of the previous movies by featuring an actual hangover during the end credits may barely justify the picture’s title, but it’s has a dreadfully weak “Look what they did this time!” punch line. If that’s the kind of comedy gold they had in reserve, it’s just as well Part III is played mostly straight.

Talking of which, what a complete waste of John Goodman. He’s a brilliantly funny actor so they stick him playing a sullen heavy? It’s nice to see the lovely Heather Graham again, but she only appears for five minutes. And well done for not finding a place for Mike Tyson (my ears still haven’t recovered from the assault he committed at the end of Part II).

Nevertheless, while I wish they hadn’t gone the route of making a crime picture, the picture itself isn’t unwatchable. Nor does it outstay its welcome; Phillips has kept each of his pictures around the 100-minute mark, and this is no exception. It’s probably the maximum length you want for a comedy (although, as I’ve said, this isn’t really a comedy... ) Phillips also continues to strive against the point-and-shoot approach found in most comedies. The Hangovers are some of the best looking US comedies around, and the director is consistently visually inventive; he needs to be, as the return to Las Vegas rather inhibits the possibilities (he really shone with the Thai locations in Part II).

So The Hangover Part III takes out the jokes that were the main attraction of the comedy franchise, and it even bypasses the titular physical state during the film proper. The characters have little place left to go, and the focus on Chow is a mistake in as much as it further accentuates these shortcomings. Whatever Phillips did, the critics were going to hate this movie, so it’s a shame he was so stung by Part II’s reception that he threw out the baby with the bath water. Perhaps he just wasn’t inspired to be funny. It’s hard to say if Part III would have been a bigger hit if it had repeated the formula; I know I’d have been happier, but audiences just weren’t there on opening weekend Perhaps it’s a case where the success of Part II didn’t reflect how it ultimately went down (see also Shrek 2 and Dead Man’s Chest). Or perhaps the public saw the ads and rightly decided the title was a great big fib.

**1/2

Abandon selective targeting. Shoot everything.

28 Weeks Later (2007) (SPOILERS) The first five minutes of 28 Weeks Later are far and away the best part of this sequel, offering in quick succession a devastating moral quandary and a waking nightmare, immortalised on the screen. After that, while significantly more polished, Juan Carlos Fresnadillo reveals his concept to be altogether inferior to Danny Boyle and Alex Garland’s, falling back on the crutches of gore, nihilism, and disengaging and limiting shifts of focus between characters in whom one has little investment in the first place.

The Bible never said anything about amphetamines.

The Color of Money (1986) (SPOILERS) I tend to think it’s evident when Scorsese isn’t truly exercised by material. He can still invest every ounce of the technical acumen at his fingertips, and the results can dazzle on that level, but you don’t really feel the filmmaker in the film. Which, for one of his pictures to truly carry a wallop, you need to do. We’ve seen quite a few in such deficit in recent years, most often teaming with Leo. The Color of Money , however, is the first where it was out-and-out evident the subject matter wasn’t Marty’s bag. He needed it, desperately, to come off, but in the manner a tradesman who wants to keep getting jobs. This sequel to The Hustler doesn’t linger in the mind, however good it may be, moment by moment.

Doctors make the worst patients.

Coma (1978) (SPOILERS) Michael Crichton’s sophomore big-screen feature, and by some distance his best. Perhaps it’s simply that this a milieu known to him, or perhaps it’s that it’s very much aligned to the there-and-now and present, but Coma , despite the occasional lapse in this adaptation of colleague Robin Cook’s novel, is an effective, creepy, resonant thriller and then some. Crichton knows his subject, and it shows – the picture is confident and verisimilitudinous in a way none of his other directorial efforts are – and his low-key – some might say clinical – approach pays dividends. You might also call it prescient, but that would be to suggest its subject matter wasn’t immediately relevant then too.

I said I had no family. I didn’t say I had an empty apartment.

The Apartment (1960) (SPOILERS) Billy Wilder’s romcom delivered the genre that rare Best Picture Oscar winner. Albeit, The Apartment amounts to a rather grim (now) PG-rated scenario, one rife with adultery, attempted suicide, prostitution of the soul and subjective thereof of the body. And yet, it’s also, finally, rather sweet, so salving the darker passages and evidencing the director’s expertly judged balancing act. Time Out ’s Tom Milne suggested the ending was a cop out (“ boy forgives girl and all’s well ”). But really, what other ending did the audience or central characters deserve?

Your desecration of reality will not go unpunished.

2021-22 Best-of, Worst-of and Everything Else Besides The movies might be the most visible example of attempts to cling onto cultural remnants as the previous societal template clatters down the drain. It takes something people really want – unlike a Bond movie where he kicks the can – to suggest the model of yesteryear, one where a billion-dollar grosser was like sneezing. You can argue Spider-Man: No Way Home is replete with agendas of one sort or another, and that’s undoubtedly the case (that’s Hollywood), but crowding out any such extraneous elements (and they often are) is simply a consummate crowd-pleaser that taps into tangible nostalgia through its multiverse take. Of course, nostalgia for a mere seven years ago, for something you didn’t like anyway, is a symptom of how fraught these times have become.

Captain, he who walks in fire will burn his feet.

The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (1973) (SPOILERS) Ray Harryhausen returns to the kind of unadulterated fantasy material that made Jason and the Argonauts such a success – swords & stop motion, if you like. In between, there were a couple of less successful efforts, HG Wells adaptation First Men in the Moon and The Valley of the Gwangi (which I considered the best thing ever as a kid: dinosaur walks into a cowboy movie). Harryhausen’s special-effects supremacy – in a for-hire capacity – had also been consummately eclipsed by Raquel Welch’s fur bikini in One Million Years B.C . The Golden Voyage of Sinbad follows the expected Dynamation template – blank-slate hero, memorable creatures, McGuffin quest – but in its considerable favour, it also boasts a villainous performance by nobody-at-the-time, on-the-cusp-of-greatness Tom Baker.

Listen to the goddamn qualified scientists!

Don’t Look Up (2021) (SPOILERS) It’s testament to Don’t Look Up ’s “quality” that critics who would normally lap up this kind of liberal-causes messaging couldn’t find it within themselves to grant it a free pass. Adam McKay has attempted to refashion himself as a satirist since jettisoning former collaborator Will Ferrell, but as a Hollywood player and an inevitably socio-politically partisan one, he simply falls in line with the most obvious, fatuous propagandising.

Archimedes would split himself with envy.

Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger (1977) (SPOILERS) Generally, this seems to be the Ray Harryhausen Sinbad outing that gets the short straw in the appreciation stakes. Which is rather unfair. True, Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger lacks Tom Baker and his rich brown voice personifying evil incarnate – although Margaret Whiting more than holds her own in the wickedness stakes – and the structure follows the Harryhausen template perhaps over scrupulously (Beverly Cross previously collaborated with the stop-motion auteur on Jason and the Argonauts , and would again subsequently with Clash of the Titans ). But the storytelling is swift and sprightly, and the animation itself scores, achieving a degree of interaction frequently more proficient than its more lavishly praised peer group.

You just threw a donut in the hot zone!

Den of Thieves (2018) (SPOILERS) I'd heard this was a shameless Heat rip-off, and the presence of Gerard Butler seemed to confirm it would be passable-at-best B-heist hokum, so maybe it was just middling expectations, even having heard how enthused certain pockets of the Internet were, but Den of Thieves is a surprisingly very satisfying entry in the genre. I can't even fault it for attempting to Keyser Soze the whole shebang at the last moment – add a head in a box and you have three 1995 classics in one movie – even if that particular conceit doesn’t quite come together.

You have a very angry family, sir.

Eternals (2021) (SPOILERS) It would be overstating the case to suggest Eternals is a pleasant surprise, but given the adverse harbingers surrounding it, it’s a much more serviceable – if bloated – and thematically intriguing picture than I’d expected. The signature motifs of director and honestly-not-billionaire’s-progeny Chloé Zhao are present, mostly amounting to attempts at Malick-lite gauzy natural light and naturalism at odds with the rigidly unnatural material. There’s woke to spare too, since this is something of a Kevin Feige Phase Four flagship, one that rather floundered, showcasing his designs for a nu-MCU. Nevertheless, Eternals manages to maintain interest despite some very variable performances, effects, and the usual retreat into standard tropes, come the final big showdown.

Now In Full Color, with a Happier Ending

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