Popcorn Kernels: Ladies Doing It For Themselves

In which we review three female-led comedies I saw in theaters, again during a time I didn't have my computer readily available, so we'll do some short ones to catch up.

Life of the Party

Year: 2018

Director: Ben Falcone

Cast: Melissa McCarthy, Maya Rudolph, Gillian Jacobs

Run Time: 1 hour 45 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

After her husband leaves her, a suburban mom returns to college to finish her senior year at the same time as her daughter.

So, I can completely understand why, but Ben Falcone keeps making movies with his wife Melissa McCarthy. On paper, that's a really sweet thing to do, but considering the quality of the movies they make together and how unjustly violent the physical humor within them tends to be, I can't help but worry that he might actually hate her with a burning passion.

Although this movie tones down the hardcore slapstick of their previous collaboration The Boss (she isn't falling down concrete flights of stairs in this one), there is a full three minute scene slammed right into the middle of Life of the Party's run time where we're meant to rejoice in her character sweating and flailing through an oral presentation while the camera coldly and impassively judges her every move. It's so uncomfortable and out of tone with the rest of the film that it's frankly repulsive.

That said, Melissa McCarthy is good at what she does, at always, though the material here really isn't serving her. The movie doesn't play with the fish-out-of-water nature of her character archetype nearly as much as it promises, instead packing the corners of this movie with cartoonishly wacky characters that don't really have anything to do with the premise. Don't get me wrong, these people are actually the highlights of the movie, but it's conceptually broken in a way that doesn't lend to it being a satisfying whole (literally, the character of her daughter vanishes for twenty minutes at a time, and we're meant to have any emotional reaction to their drama at the end of the movie).

These aforementioned cartoon characters include the delightful Gillian Jacobs as an older student who has just woken up from a coma and has no small amount of notoriety which she exploits to no end. We also get recent SNL standout Heidi Gardner as a spectacularly ill-conceived character that somehow works because she holds it all together with the duct tape of being f**king hilarious. Her character is named Linor, a name nobody can pronounce because they apparently never had a Poe unit in English class, and she's meant to be emo or goth in some way even though that character type is a decade old and she just dresses like a normal human being. It's confusing but I wouldn't trade her for the world.

And then there's Maya Rudolph as the best friend, who drops in every twenty minutes or so like a neutron bomb of comedy, ripping open the fabric of the movie for some bone-disolvingly hilarious broad humor that doesn't really have anything to do with the story we're actually watching. But honestly, any distraction from the blandness this movie traffics in is very welcome.

Life of the Party vacillates back and forth between decency and mediocrity more times than I can count, but overall I think its net value is positive. McCarthy's too-young love interest Luke Benworth is cute and delightfully earnest, there are more jokes than groans, and it didn't super overstay its welcome like most of the worst vehicles for this particular actress. So... don't go see it I guess. But if it ends up on Netflix and you need to kill time while folding laundry, why not click it on?

Rating: 6/10

Book Club

Year: 2018

Director: Bill Holderman

Cast: Diane Keaton, Jane Fonda, Candice Bergen

Run Time: 1 hour 44 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Four old ladies read Fifty Shades of Grey and get real horny.

The way Diane Keaton folds the back cover of a book so far back that it wraps almost all the way around to the front again is a crime against nature that makes me wonder if she's ever used her hands to do anything in her entire life, or maybe recently got her bones replaced with adamantium and is having trouble adjusting. Honestly, I could end the review there, but I probably shouldn't.

Book Club is one of those pictures where a bunch of famous people get together for three scenes and then split off to have their own mini romantic stories, Valentine's Day style. It's nice that women of a certain age are being given material like this, but if only the material was any good at all. If I knew I had to choose between Candice Bergen making jokes about Internet dating that were old in 2002, Jane Fonda being a Samantha all over Don Johnson, Mary Steenburgen trying real hard to get railed by Craig T. Nelson mostly by tap dancing, or Diane Keaton pretending that Andy Garcia's character isn't an abusive asshole who literally threatens to crash a plane and murder her if she doesn't agree to go to coffee with him, I'd have chosen to see a different movie. 

The film briefly comes alive when the women get together and sit around preparing heaping piles of hors d'oeuvres that they never eat, but for the most part Book Club is an inglorious train wreck: The light, jazzy score is like an out of control kaiju rampaging through the film and crushing everyone beneath its giant feet. The jokes in the script are so gentle that they avoid having punch-lines, because punching sounds too violent. These veteran actresses perform like they've just taken an Ambien and are impatiently waiting for it to kick in. There's a beleaguered metaphor with a cat that is supposed to represent Candice Bergen's vagina. 

It's pleasant enough to sit through, like watching a mildly raunchy Claritin commercial, but these people deserve better, and that's just that.

Rating: 4/10

Tully

Year: 2018

Director: Jason Reitman

Cast: Charlize Theron, Mackenzie Davis, Mark Duplass 

Run Time: 1 hour 35 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

A downtrodden suburban mom hires a night nanny who changes her perspective on things.

So it turns out this is what happens when Diablo Cody stops making up ludicrous slang terms and starts getting real. A slow, almost neorealist journey through modern motherhood with almost a couple jokes that dissolves into a deeply weird third act that negates all the character development of the first two before tying on a bow that could have happened without any of that nonsense.

Tully seems to want desperately to be an art film, given the abortive mermaid metaphor they keep jamming in at random places that goes absolutely nowhere, but it just ends up being an even more punishing version of the slow, unyielding beats of the previous collaboration between this actress, writer, and director, Young Adult.

Much like Book Club, the only place Tully shines is in the chemistry between its two leads, the consistently powerhouse-y Charlize Theron and the bright young ingenue Mackenzie Davis, who is cropping up more and more in movies and TV series that are very good and right on the fringes of actually being massively popular. But other than that, Tully is too relaxed to find any narrative thrust until it's way too late.

Honestly, the only thing I truly liked about it was that we get to spend a minute listening to snippets from the entire She's So Unusual album from Cyndi Lauper. I guess that makes it a recommend because that album is great, but otherwise don't waste your time on this one.

Rating: 5/10

Word Count: 1291

I Ain't Afraid Of No Girls

Year: 2016

Director: Paul Feig

Cast: Kristen Wiig, Melissa McCarthy, Kate McKinnon

Run Time: 1 hour 56 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Man alive, am I glad the remake of Ghostbusters is in theaters so people can finally shut up about it. This needlessly divisive remake has had the one-two punch of taking on the mantle of a virulently nostalgic property and igniting the raging misogyny of certain online cave dwellers, so it has not been a fun time being a member of the horror community. 

As pointless and awful as many remakes are, I’m always willing to give them a chance. Especially when they’re from the team behind Spy, my favorite comedy of last year. Not to mention the fact that Ghostbusters is an iconic franchise with a series of major narrative flaws spiderwebbing across its surface, making it a more or less perfect property to update, if we have to reboot movies at all.

Hollywood certainly seems to enjoy it.

Ghostbusters doesn’t recreate the original plot so much as it sets it back to square one with different characters and sees where they go from there. These characters are Erin Gilbert (Kristen Wiig), a meek doctor of particle physics who has attempted to suppress her belief in the paranormal in a weak stab at getting tenure; Abby Yates (Melissa McCarthy), her high school best friend and a true believer who has dedicated her life to paranormal research; Jillian Holtzman (Kate McKinnon), a dubiously sane engineer with an anarchistic flair for creating extremely dangerous, untested machinery; and Patty Tolan (Leslie Jones), a subway worker who is the Ghostbusters’ first client and quickly becomes a part of the team.

As the Ghostbusters jet around New York City investigating apparitions, spirits, and grim grinning ghosts, they realize that a sinister someone is creating devices the amplify paranormal activity (which might explain why it got five sequels). They must figure out his plan and stop him before it’s too late.

Probably how most people felt when they heard this film was in development.

Is Ghostbusters better than the original? No. If you’re here on a hate odyssey, this is your cue to stop reading.

OK, now that the angries are gone, I’m safe to tell you that the remake is actually pretty good! As it should be. This is Paul Feig and Melissa McCarthy, not some anonymous music video director and Tiger Beat’s plastic Teen of the Week. Just like the original four Busters, these ladies weren’t chosen because they were sexy, of-the-now superstars. There’s a reason they didn’t cast Margot Robbie, Gal Gadot, Olivia Munn, and hell, Jennifer Lawrence, why not. They cast genuinely funny women who can sell a joke like it’s a Pokémon Go in-app purchase.

And Ghostbusters really is funny. That’s its greatest strength, which is probably good news considering it’s a comedy film. Obviously, humor is in the gut of the beholder, and the jokes are in a vastly, almost unrecognizably different vein from the original, but there’s a lot of great stuff at work here. Chris Hemsworth is an obvious standout because every line he’s given is a joke, but his ditzy receptionist nabs the best scene in the movie, a job interview-cum-Abbott and Costello routine that is delivered with diamond-sharp comic timing. Kate McKinnon is also a magnetic presence, presenting a spectacularly offbeat, unpredictable set of line readings that are always bizarrely fascinating. 

Probably the best overall performance is Wiig’s, because she effortlessly finds the po-faced wackiness in her straight-woman character while maintaining enough of an emotional throughline that she provides us an easy access point to the more out-there characters and developments.

Everyone else is good too, but I can’t just copy-paste the cast list here and call it a review.

Ghostbusters is very funny from beginning to end, but here’s the thing. At a certain point in the second act, it kind of stops trying to be funny. When the jokes come, they’re mostly just as solid, but during the course of its typically vast Feigian run time it slowly starts to kind of take itself seriously, presenting lots of ghostly action and the series’ traditional deus ex machina climax with hardly a glimmer of irony.

Then it attempts to tie a goopy little bow around everything with a series of character moments that strain to pump raw emotion from a one-dimensional well. These characters are great to watch as they quip and bounce off one another, but only Erin and Abby’s arcs have any meat on their bones. Everyone else is far too weak to support the more dramatic turn the film abruptly shifts into in the middle of the finale. Hell, even Erin and Abby are given a scene so heavy with melodrama and a wailing Schindler’s List score that it topples face-first into the dirt.

But after a bit, Ghostbusters remembers what it is and course corrects. It never fully recovers from that massive hit, but it’s still a sprightly, amusing popcorn picture. Once again, the trailers for this Feig comedy dreadfully undersold what it had to offer, so while it was better than I worried it might be, it wasn’t really as great as I’d hoped. Oh sure, it’s unique and hilarious enough to stand on its own two feet in the Ghostbusters canon and its fun cameos mostly avoid incessant pandering (mostly), but it’s not a resounding success to the tune of a Spy or a Bridesmaids.

The only thing I will concede to the haters is that the FallOut Boy cover of the Ghostbusters thing is truly dreadful (they also donated the worst song of 2014 to Big Hero 6), but the filmmakers know what’s up and they give Ray Parker, Jr. more than enough airtime. Anyway, go see it! It’s a dizzy, fun summer movie the likes of which haven’t really been packing multiplexes this year.

TL;DR: Ghostbusters is a wholly decent remake that isn't better than original but offers a unique enough entry to be worth watching.

Rating: 6/10

Word Count: 1003

Reviews In This Series
Ghostbusters (Reitman, 1984)
Ghostbusters II (Reitman, 1989)
Ghostbusters (Feig, 2016)

Riches Get Stiches

Year: 2016

Director: Ben Falcone

Cast: Melissa McCarthy, Kristen Bell, Peter Dinklage

Run Time: 1 hour 39 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Melissa McCarthy is the most important force in modern cinema. OK, maybe that was a wee bit of “this review needs a hook” exaggeration, but she’s certainly in the Top 10. As a cultural figure, she is proving that a woman can lead and, more importantly, succeed in a vulgar film comedy. This might seem like a trivial thing to attach so much importance to, but it’s far from it. She’s opening up a dialogue about women in cinema, sexual agency, and body image, and the best thing is that she’s a genuinely  funny performer. 2015’s Spy may have been the first film to truly get her as a lead, but her continued success speaks volumes.

Of course, every major cinematic icon has their follies. Marlon Brando had The Island of Dr. Moreau. Al Pacino was in Gigli. Robert De Niro perpetrated Dirty Grandpa upon the world. Not to put too fine a point on it, but there’s a reason this discussion is cropping up at the beginning of a review for The Boss. I would scarcely say that the film is as egregious a misstep as the cinematic bile that is Dirty Grandpa, but – you know what? Let’s pick this up in a second. Time to hit the plot.

Let’s crack this puppy open and drink that sweet, sweet story nectar.

In The Boss, Michelle Darnell (Melissa McCarthy) is a grotesquely wealthy woman who doesn’t respect her hardworking assistant Claire (Kristen Bell). Her life gets a bit of the old switcheroo when her ex-lover/business rival Reynault (Peter Dinklage) exposes her for insider trading, sending her to jail and stripping her assets. She is reluctantly taken in by Claire and her daughter Rachel (Ella Anderson), but on a visit to Rachel’s to Totally Not Girl Scouts meeting she gets an idea. With Claire’s help she creates Darnell’s Darlings, a troupe of young women who sell brownies. And thus begins the epic journey of a rich lady gettin’ rich again.

But will she be rich with money or… (drumroll) friendship?

The thing about The Boss is that it’s not terrible, especially not to the degree that critics have been implying. It’s merely generic, which can be just as damning. Here, your average Melissa McCarthy profanity is grafted onto the most sundry family comedy plot imaginable the point that it’s pretty much for no one. It’s too vulgar for the kids who can sit through this kind of plot on the regular and it’s too toothless and predictable for the over 17 crowd. Take out all the F-bombs and sex jokes and you’ve got yourself a Hilary Duff vehicle.

However, I do respect The Boss for being the second McCarthy film in a row that doesn’t mock her weight of integrate it into her character. In fact, she’s playing a highly successful and fashionable woman, which is light years ahead of her previous filmography. Although Michelle Darnell has a predilection for turtlenecks so awful they provide strong evidence for the necessity of capitol punishment, she is a character worthy of Melissa McCarthy, though she’s not in a film that can really support her.

If Ghostbusters doesn’t prove to be the best McCarthy film this year, something will have gone terribly wrong.

For what it is, The Boss is totally fine. While the plot plods along the path everybody knew it would set on from the first frame, the comedy – always a subjective affair – does a decent job of keeping audiences occupied. We get a bit of the old fish out of water gambit, mocking the cluelessness of the rich (Occupy Hollywood!), and some classic “let’s dump the hot blonde in a chunky sweater and call her unattractive!” The best material comes from Tyler Labine, the James Corden-esque love interest for Kristen Bell who brings a much-needed dose of warm, earnest comedy in a register that is actually a little unexpected. For once.

The only comedic element that well and truly rankles is the physical comedy, which follows the recent trend of upsettingly punishing slapstick. Good physical comedy, like The Three Stooges, works well because it exists in a heightened cartoon reality here the characters aren’t actually in physical danger. The Boss is not a prime example of good physical comedy. A little girl fight scene almost gets there, because the filmmakers knew they needed to tiptoe around that one, but Ms. Darnell is run through the wringer, slammed into walls and down concrete stairs with deadly force, the sound design doubling down on sickening thuds and crunches. They’re more like UFC fights than gags, which totally undermines any potential laughs whatsoever.

So much of The Boss is a swing and a miss (an aborted Kathy Bates cameo literally has her abruptly exiting a scene on a galloping horse, there’s a full rap performance, and the climax is a hypercolor nightmare of violent nonsense), but the same genericness that keeps it from being truly great likewise prevents it from totally sucking. It’s a buffer of blandness.

While I should pan The Boss for a woeful misrepresentation of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre as a gory movie, cutting between two scenes 45 minutes apart like I wouldn’t f**king notice, there’s enough good here to earn a qualified positive score. Labine is excellent and hopefully this film allows him to reach a wider audience, Ella Anderson is one of the better child actors in recent memory, and the easy emotional beats are far from taxing. If you’re looking for an unstressful time at the movies, you’ve come to the right place. Otherwise, maybe don’t bother with this one.

TL;DR: The Boss is a defanged Melissa McCarthy vehicle that doesn’t really have a place with any audience.
Rating: 6/10
Word Count: 977

International Woman Of Mystery

Year: 2015

Director: Paul Feig

Cast: Melissa McCarthy, Rose Byrne, Jude Law

Run Time: 1 hour 59 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Is it just me, or are Apatow comedies better when he’s not actually directing them? So far, I’d say the best to come from his stable are pretty unequivocally Paul Feig’s Bridesmaids and Nick Stoller’s Neighbors. Feig’s most recent bout in the ring isn’t exactly proving me wrong. Spy, his newest Melissa McCarthy vehicle, might just be the apotheosis of everything that that collective has been working toward: a brash, fearless, and fun genre exercise that blows everything that came before it right on out of the water.

Hell, it even blows itself out of the water.

Spy tells the story of CIA agent Susan Cooper (Melissa McCarthy), a timid woman who squanders her potential by working behind a desk, providing navigation for the inexplicably British Agent Bradley Fine (Jude Law), on whom she has a crush the size of a moon-destroying rocket. When one of his missions is compromised by the wicked heiress Reina (Rose Byrne), the CIA discovers that she knows the identities of all their active agents. In desperation, they send Susan after her, because she’s unrecognizable.

Thus begins a heartwarming tale of a mousy pushover stepping into the spotlight to become the butt-kicking superspy she always knew she could be. Well, in time. First she must fight her way through a series of wacky hijinks, aided by her coworker and friend Nancy (Miranda Hart).

Who I recognized from this awesome Mamma Mia! parody because I’m cultured.

Spy is, to put it lightly, an experience. It’s a female-led Austin Powers that - like Bridesmaids – isn’t FOR women. It’s WITH women for EVERYONE. And there really is something for everybody here. The raunchy comedy is spliced onto a legitimate action thriller that devotes as much attention to high octane spy escapades as it does to belly laughs.

While we’re on the subject of bellies, I really have to commend this film for not using McCarthy’s weight as a punchline. She’s a remarkably talented comic actress, but previous vehicles for her like the abhorrent Identity Thief center her character and humor entirely around her weight It’s crass, it’s unfair, and it’s dreadfully boring.

In Spy, her character has her fair share of flaws, but her size isn’t even a factor in her initial lack of appeal. In fact, the only joke that could really be considered a fat joke is just a pratfall. The truly unfortunate thing is that the trailers latched onto that scene like it was a slice of toast bearing the face of the Virgin Mary, hopelessly misrepresenting the film and causing me to skip it in theaters. Hence, this egregiously late review.

But I have since rectified my mistake, and I am here to tell you that, if you haven’t seen Spy, you’re missing out. Humor is entirely subjective, of course, but the fact that both Sergio and I found Spy to be the funniest movie of the year should tell you something. We’re hardly ever on the same page.

Hell, that guy loves Winter’s Bone, which is as far from being a Brennan movie as a Rob Zombie reboot of Grease.

Spy’s humor comes from a variety of places: spy parody, McCarthy improve, Apatowian gross-out antics, and secondhand embarrassment all jockey for position. But in addition to McCarthy, who is a reliably bankable humorist, big chuckles come form two unexpected performers. First of all, Rose Byrne  - who is already well on her way to comic superstardom thanks to her being the single best element of Neighbors – is incontestably hilarious as the spoiled and evil antagonist with a heart of gold leaf. Her performance is so consistently out of left field that she always keeps you on your toes.

But the true lightning in a bottle standout of Spy is one Jason Statham, as McCarthy’s careless and vain coworker who tails her incognito as she attempts to covertly carry out her mission. He distills the essence of every Jason Statham character into one stiletto sharp caricature, blowing his typical badass bravado tremendously out of proportion. It’s a genius portrayal, a character with infinite confidence in his own abilities without actually being any help at all. He is not always served well by the Apatow-standard editing, which just lets him keep going and neglects to trim his one-liners to an appropriate amount. I call this the “quip tsunami” technique, and while hilarious at time, it’s less controlled here than in similar films. Nevertheless, Statham is a sparkling presence in an already uncontrollably fun movie.

The best thing about Spy is that, even if you utterly detest the comedy, you can tune it out and still have a one hundred percent functional spy picture. The action is ludicrous and over-the-top, but it’s not like you’ll get anything different if you shell out for Spectre. And this way you don’t have to pretend to care about Bond’s awkward, fumbling chemistry with his wallpaper love interest. It’s a win-win! Spy’s action benefits from a truly staggering budget for a comedy, which allows it to indulge in just as much globetrotting splendor as the best of the best.

With the humor of a Bridesmaids and the absurd, slightly inappropriate swashbuckling of an Octopussy, Spy is just plain a fun time at the movies. The best of the constantly improving McCarthy-Feig pictures, Spy actually gives me high hopes for the new Ghostbusters. Sleuth it out of Redbox and snag yourself a good time!

TL;DR: Spy is an excellent, female led comedy that combines Bondian thrills with uproarious comedy.
Rating: 9/10
Word Count: 941

Archive: May 26, 2013

Never Drinking Again - The Hangover Part III

Year: 2013
Director: Todd Phillip
Cast: Bradley Cooper, Ed Helms, Zach Galifianakis
Run Time: 1 hour 40 minutes
MPAA Rating: R

Let’s start with the good. Evidently, the filmmakers listened to the critics ofThe Hangover II. The major complaints about that film were as follows:

 1) It was an exact rehash of the events of the original.

 2) The series unabashedly reveled in offensive frat boy comedy, relying on bodily humor, and generally being homophobic/racist/misogynistic/offensive to whatever groups those categories might have missed.

Part III’s plot certainly did manage to avoid the established Drug/Party/Hangover/Lather/Rinse/Repeat cycle of the first two, and the crude humor was at a low ebb – not entirely absent but generally not too aggressive.

Unfortunately, this was at the cost of alienating any fans the franchise might have had left. I’m in no way supporting the direction the movies were going, but by removing the elements the critics found unappealing they also removed anything that might make this film worth watching to anybody who actually enjoyed the first two.

A Hangover movie without the frat comedy is like a smore without the chocolate and marshmallow – less unhealthy but still not a satisfying treat. Without its trademark style, Part III didn’t have a leg to stand on – it’s not like there was a probing character drama hidden underneath the veneer of fat jokes.

 
Not exactly the Meryl Streep of comedy

I suppose I can’t call this a review if I don’t briefly touch on the actual plot of the film.

Alan (Zach Galifianakis)’s lazy manchild behavior has finally gotten to his father (Jeffrey Tambor, always a welcome presence) who loses his patience and begins a tirade which ends in his collapse on the floor. Cut to that scene from the trailer where Alan sings Ave Maria, which would be funny if I hadn’t already seen it 21 times.

His sister (Sasha Barrese) decides to hold an intervention for… something? I guess? He’s off his meds. Is this intervention to get him to start taking drugs? Anyway, she invites the Wolf Pack - his friends Stu (Ed Helms), Phil (Bradley Cooper), and her husband Doug (Justin Bartha, who is tragically underused in these films – and, may I say, much more handsome than Mr. Cooper in my opinion. Sorry Aunt Jill).

Also Melissa McCarthy is in the movie for approximately 12 seconds

So blah blah blah the Wolf Pack is driving him to the New Horizons rehabilitation center in Arizona. Before we continue, two things: First, these centers are almost always called New Horizons. I guess it’s a national chain. Second, I’m still not entirely sure why he’s going here. After some deep digging it seems that they are seeking to stop him from being such a lazy unmotivated weirdo. Correct me if I’m wrong, but this man doesn’t need rehab. He needs a firm slap in the face.

Then after some truly impressive narrative strong-arming, gang boss Marshall (John Goodman, who is phoning it in so hard that I can practically hear a dial tone) has captured Doug and is threatening to kill him if the Wolf Pack doesn’t track down Mr. Chow (Ken Jeong), who is on the run, having escaped from a Thai prison. Chow has hightailed it to Tijuana and he is the only person who knows where Marshall’s 21 million dollars of stolen gold bars are hidden.

There follows an inexplicably large number of scenes where the gang tries to drug Chow, after which he (rightly) locks them in a basement, pinning the blame for a robbery on them. They chase him back to Vegas (because of course) where he has taken up in the penthouse of Caesar’s Palace (because of course). Mr. Chow is basically a Bond villain at this point, hiding in his Evil Lair.

Anyway, things happen and the movie ends. I don’t want to spoil it and I don’t really care enough to write about it anyway. The events presented are largely devoid of discernable jokes, unless you think “haha, Alan’s a three-year-old” is so hilarious that it can carry an entire film.

The film is consistently dull, and in the patches where it isn’t, is mostly just annoying. One of the central relationships of the film is that between Alan and Chow, two lightning in a bottle characters who have no business having an entire plot built around them. At this point they are shrieking caricatures of what they used to be and prove once and for all that sometimes a bit part in a film is so effective because it is so brief.

It’s funny because he’s Asian

The strongest moments of The Hangover Part III are unambiguously those that call back to the original Hangover – the sequence with Heather Graham and her son in particular is alarmingly sweet and sincere. Of course, it’s much too early to feel nostalgia for a movie that debuted in 2009, but it was a far better film than this one and the scenes allow some relief from the plodding story of Part III while also reminding us that there was once life in these listlessly jerking marionettes known as Alan, Stu, and Phil.

This film is presented as the finale to the Hangover trilogy and, assuming that box office revenue isn’t so large as to necessitate a sequel, it’s nice to finally put a nail in the coffin of this uninspired, shuffling comedy. This film will undoubtedly fade into history as a milquetoasty nothing, which I suppose is better than being universally reviled.

TL;DR: The Hangover Part III is the third installment to a crass comedy franchise that is neither particularly crass or particularly comedic.

Rating: 3/10

Should I spend money on this?  If you are devoted to these characters or are a member of that resolute minority group that call themselves fans ofPart II, it might be worth it to watch their storylines be tied off. If you aren’t, skip it.

Word Count: 1027