A wave of hatred has engulfed the third entry in director Todd Phillips’s The Hangover series. This film, billed as Part III (a nod to The Godfather sequels), has been branded as ugly, unfunny and forgettable.
The Hangover Part II also drew very negative reviews when it was released in 2011, with reviewers picking the film up on its ‘toe-curlingly racist’ humour (Chris Tookey, Daily Mail) and for ‘repeating almost every trick’ of the first movie (Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian). The Edge’s own review of the film slammed it with a 1-star rating, saying it marked ‘a significant moment in American cinema’ as it showed that ‘we have now reached a time when racism, homophobia and misogyny can be perpetrated and celebrated in a mainstream box-office hit.’ However, fans of the first movie still ventured into theatres, and the film became a success.
Part III has attracted scathing criticism, with The Telegraph’s critic Tim Robey giving it a 1-star review, saying it contains elements of the previous film’s ‘misjudged excess’. He cites a scene, shown partially in the trailer, where a giraffe is killed in a ‘grisly’ way, causing a major traffic accident. The Seattle Times has labelled the film ‘a big headache’, with reviewer Soren Anderson accusing it of being ‘an ugly, angry film packed with egregious violence that isn’t funny in the least’. The article also draws attention to the amount of animal death in the film, and says that director Phillips ‘seems to have gone out of his way to take a blowtorch to the goodwill he earned from the original’.
Although there have been some moderate-to-positive reviews, with Christy Lemire for the Associated Press praising Phillips for ‘exploring matters of real consequence, rather than simply mining them for brash laughs’, the film’s ranking still stands at a noticeably low 29% [UPDATED – As of 23/05/13, 9.24am). on Rotten Tomatoes. The Edge’s review of the film will be published soon.
The Hangover Part III is released in the UK on 24 May.
