Comedy is hard, but The Hangover made it look easy.
You have to get a little lucky at virtually every stage of the production process for a comedy to really work. A great script won't save you if the performances are off, for instance, and great performances won't save you if the timing and nuance gets lost in the editing room. We've all seen enough shitty comedies that should have been lay-ups to know how delicate they are.
But the most important thing is that no matter how much care you take, no matter how hard you work, it can't look like you're trying. Unlike a sci-fi blockbuster driven by special effects or an action flick heavy on stuntwork, the amount of enjoyment an audience gets out of a comedy is often inversely proportionate to the amount of effort they can see on the screen.
That's a big part of what made the first Hangover so great. It had an easy charm and relentless pace that made its rapid fire stream of jokes look effortless; like these guys couldn't help but get themselves into these hilarious situations. It didn't make you think about how hard Todd Phillips, Zach Galifianakis, Ed Helms and Brad Cooper were trying to make you laugh; it just made you think about what a good time you were having with The Wolfpack.
The film has its detractors, but they're about as close to objectively wrong as you can get — you could screen The Hangover for a packed crowd today and it would still work its arse off. It's the perfect mainstream comedy.
There's a magic to The Hangover that — in two attempts — its cast and crew haven't been able to recreate from the top down. Because that's not how these things work, is it? If you can see them desperately straining to strike gold in the same spot, they're going to be digging for a while.
The Hangover Part III does, however, come much closer to finding a winning formula than its immediate predecessor.
Don't get me wrong — it's still painfully apparent that they're trying to recapture what worked about the first movie. The camaraderie of that film is strangely absent — this time around, we're constantly being told how much Phil (Cooper) and Stu (Helms) love Alan (Galifianakis), despite his fuck-ups, but it doesn't seem like Phil and Stu particularly like each other. The set-pieces seem to be operating on an even more unlikely level of reality than ever, flirting with Mission: Impossible territory, and the characters often border on caricatures.
Despite all that, there are plenty of laughs here, particularly when Galifianakis, Cooper and Helms are simply allowed to kick back and riff on these characters they've been inhabiting on-and-off for four years now. For their part, Todd Phillips and cinematographer Lawrence Sher continue to make these the best looking films in their genre, lending the proceedings an essential sense of style.
Crucially, Phillips has a curveball up his sleeve this time — a sense of gravitas that emerges at unlikely moments. We're far, far from 'dramedy' territory here, but I'll be damned if Galifianakis' arc over the course of The Hangover Part III isn't emotionally affecting (his reunion with one character from the first film is a genuine lump-in-your-throat moment).
This is both a strength and a weakness — a strength because it adds a little depth to a franchise that didn't really have any; a weakness because The Hangover made you feel like you and your friends could take on the world and win.
The Hangover Part III will just make you feel old.
3/5
The Hangover Part III is in cinemas now.
