Hangover III Barely a Comedy

The Hangover Part III is here, but if critics are to be believed, you might want to black out and erase it from your memory. Here's what people are saying:

• A giraffe is decapitated in the first five minutes, and maybe someday "beheading the giraffe" will replace "jumping the shark" as "the cliché of choice to mark a franchise's official descent into pitiable pointlessness," quips Andrew Barker at Variety. It abandons the previous films' conceits, but "by playing things completely chronologically—and worse, soberly—this film's shenanigans feel witlessly arbitrary."

• "I beg of you, don’t ask me to choose between Hangover II and III," writes Kyle Smith at the New York Post. "That would be like asking a mother to choose between her children, assuming she hated her children, never wanted to see them again and wished they’d never been born in the first place." Half the characters in this one "stand around being boring," and Zach Galifianakis "hasn't made me laugh since 2007."
• "The movie is so aggressively nasty and barely funny" that it comes across as "self-loathing and self-destructive," writes Mary Pols at Time. Animals are variously shot, smothered, and drugged, and the thing's drenched in homophobia and racism against Asians. "The Hangover Part III is such a misery that when Mr. Chow directs the Wolfpack to 'stay low, like dog' it might as well be the film's motto."
• But Bill Goodykoontz at the Arizona Republic is willing to at least give it this much: Unlike the horrendous second movie, "this time, it seems like they're trying. A little, at least." The plot's a mess, but "seriously, does it matter? No, it does not. These are likeable actors, all of them," even if, at this point, the characters and the gags feel pretty repetitive.

(More movie review stories.)