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The Hangover Part III

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I had hopes for The Hangover Part III, the conclusion to director Todd Phillips’ trilogy about a group of guys who get into a lot of R-rated trouble after ingesting bad stuff for their brains. In retrospect, I feel like a major idiot for having high hopes for this one. The Hangover franchise, as it turns out, should’ve stopped at one movie. Phillips and his gang of actors captured comedic magic when an awkward bearded man drugged his buddies at a bachelor party, which led to them kidnapping Mike Tyson’s tiger and many other sordid acts. The Hangover Part II was a carbon copy of that film shipped from Las Vegas to Thailand. It had about 15 percent of the original’s laughs, but, while being a supreme disappointment, it wasn’t a complete loss. Part III is a total garbage movie, a film lacking any sense of purpose and woefully lacking in the laugh department. Phillips tries to make a completely different sort of film with his final chapter, and he sort of succeeds in that while the first film had many laughs and the second had a few, this movie has just one or two. It actually doesn’t even come off as a comedy. It’s crime thriller/kidnap movie, just about the last scenario we need to see the Wolf Pack (Zach Galifianakis, Bradley Cooper and Ed Helms) going through. The movie starts with a giraffe beheading that I will actually count as one of the film’s laughs. It then moves into an intervention where Galifianakis’s Alan is told that he will be going away for a little while. Alan does some very awkward crying, and I laughed a little more. Then the boys hit the road, and the laughter stops cold as if some sort of movie

demon sprung from the ground and smacked the film over its head with his mighty “No Laughs Anymore” sledgehammer. An evil crime lord (John Goodman) forces them off the road and introduces the moronic plot thread that this movie is really about: The search for Mr. Chow, played by the increasingly annoying Ken Jeong. by Bob Grimm Goodman kidnaps Doug (Justin Bartha) because he’s a boring character and writing bgrimm@ anything interesting for him is a task, so newsreview.com let’s just get him off the screen, shall we? The trio go on a search for Chow and 1 regrettably find him. This leads to some nonsense involving stolen gold, a return to Vegas for a cocaine party, and some surpris ingly violent moments involving guns. This Hangover film has a pretty big body count, and that’s not something I expect from a Hangover film. I expect people humping tigers or the Helms character comically removing his pancreas with tweezers while on heroin. There’s a sequence atop Caesars Palace in Vegas that looks cool, and Melissa McCarthy shows up for a not altogether terrible cameo. Galifianakis seems to be the only one in the trio really trying, with most of his shtick falling flat this time out. Cooper still plays an OK straight man, while Helms just seems lost this time out. Phillips makes the mistake of thinking we actually give a crap and have some sort of sentimental connection to these characters. No doubt, I like these actors a lot, but the characters themselves? I didn’t need three films full of them doing the same thing over and over. Make another comedy, and cast these guys, but do something new with them. The Hangover was a unique premise that should’ve been one film and out. So, what started as a good idea got unnecessarily revisited, and then got pummeled into the ground until it became unrecognizable and ugly. The Hangover Part III is Hollywood greed at its worst and has no redeeming value. Stay for the credits for a sequence where Phillips gets truly desperate and goes for last ditch laughs that can’t save his crap movie. Ω

Hot out there in the desert, Ed? Your armpit looks like a swimming pool.

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excellent 3 42 Spike Lee tried to get a movie about American hero Jackie Robinson, starring Denzel Washington, off the ground for many years, but couldn’t make it happen. I get a feeling that Lee, who made one of the great biopics with Malcolm X, would’ve done something really special with the subject. This effort from director Brian Helgeland (Payback) is OK, even really good at times, but gets awfully hokey in too many moments. Chadwick Boseman is a great pick to play Robinson, as is Lucas Black as Pee Wee Reese. Harrison Ford delivers big time as Branch Rickey, the man who brought Robinson to the majors, and Christopher Meloni leaves the movie all too soon as Dodgers manager Leo Durocher, who was suspended the year Robinson made his debut. Boseman shines, even when the movie doesn’t, and it’s a lot of fun to see Ford do something this craggy and different. I’m thinking Robinson went through some major hell during his baseball times, and this movie only scratches the surface. It’s good, but it should’ve been great.

2Fast & Furious 6 This franchise could’ve ended about five films ago, and I would’ve been fine with that. Vin Diesel mumbles his way through another fast car movie, this one with some admittedly fine driving stunts. The plot involves some nonsense about Vin and his crew (including Paul Walker) going after some other bad guy driver who’s threatening the world. He also has Letty (Michelle Rodriguez) working for him, even though she blew up in a prior movie. Dwayne Johnson is in there, too, as a badass lawman, and future installments will involve another one of my least favorite action stars if the post-credit footage is any indicator. I like to watch good pyrotechnics, but I hate it when just about everybody in these films opens their mouths. It looks like these movies will never end, and Michelle Rodriguez will never die.

4The Great Gatsby It was a little worrisome when Baz Luhrmann’s adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel had its release postponed last year. As it turns out, making the film a summer blockbuster rather than an awards season contender was a great move, because this one is right at home in the summer movie season. Shot in glorious 3-D, it works magic with the format. It’s a rollicking roaring ’20s movie that shouldn’t be missed. Leonardo DiCaprio is a marvel in the title role, giving us a vulnerable and sometimes slightly crazy Gatsby in relentless pursuit of his love, Daisy (Carey Mulligan). Tobey Maguire is excellent as narrator and Gatsby admirer Nick Carraway, while Joel Edgerton steals scenes as Tom Buchanan. Those who like Luhrmann’s opulent, sometimes frantic style will find plenty to like in this movie. He also manages to use music by Jay-Z and Lana Del Ray in a movie set nearly a century ago.

4Iron Man 3 Shane Black, director of Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (starring Robert Downey Jr. in his best performance ever) and writer of such action classics as Lethal Weapon, gets his second directorial chore and delivers big time. Tony Stark (Downey Jr.) is now an insomniac suffering from panic attacks after the events of The Avengers, and he faces a new adversary in The Mandarin (Ben Kingsley). Stark is a little bit shaky in this one, and that gives the film a dark, comic edge. Gwyneth Paltrow gets a little more screen time as Pepper Potts, while Guy Pearce and Rebecca Hall show up as mysterious scientific types. Downey Jr. is as fun as ever here, and Black knows just what to do with him. Black is also pretty snappy with the action scenes, which don’t disappoint. If this is the last of Downey Jr.’s solo Iron Man films, he’s going out on a good note.

5Mud It’s official: Jeff Nichols, who gave us the brilliant Take Shelter, is a writer/ director who stands among the best of them. Matthew McConaughey plays the title character, a chipped-tooth, wild-haired drifter living in a boat in a tree along the Mississippi. Two kids, Ellis and Neckbone (Tye Sheridan of The Tree of Life, and Jacob Lofland) stumble upon him, and find themselves part of his strange and dangerous world. McConaughey is just catching wave after wave lately, and this is his best one yet. He makes Mud a little scary, yet charming and cunning. Sheridan and Lofland are terrific as the young friends who should probably stay away from guys living in boats in trees. The cast also boasts Reese Witherspoon, Michael Shannon and Sam Shepard—all of them equally great. Ladies and gentleman, we have the year’s first “excellent” movie. Jesus, it took long enough.

2Oz the Great and Powerful James Franco is in over his head for Sam Raimi’s mostly lame prequel to The Wizard of Oz. The title character calls for somebody with that old school Hollywood charm like Robert Downey, Jr., or Johnny Depp. Franco looks like a kid playing dress up here, and he’s not even the worst thing about the movie. That would be Mila Kunis looking completely lost as the witch who will become that witch we all know from the original Oz. I’m sorry—that witch isn’t supposed to be all corseted and hot. As for Rachel Weisz, she fares best as yet another witch, while Michelle Williams is just serviceable as Glinda the Good Witch. Raimi relies heavily on CGI effects—big surprise—and they look pretty crappy for the most part. This is an underwhelming movie in much the same way his Spider-Man 3 missed the mark. It’s overblown, misguided and odd.

3Pain & Gain Director Michael Bay delivers the rare decent film with this crazy concoction based on a true story. Mark Wahlberg, Dwayne Johnson and Anthony Mackie play a trio of bodybuilders who decide to kidnap a rich guy (Tony Shalhoub) and force him to sign over all of his assets. The kidnapping plot nets them the dough, but greed and general stupidity result in the plan going south and people dying. Bay uses the story, based on the real-life shenanigans of Daniel Lugo (Wahlberg) to poke fun at the ’90s, give Wahlberg a chance to get laughs Wahlberg style, and provide Johnson with his best role yet. The movie contains all of that stuff that makes Bay such an annoying director (slo-mo, hyper-editing, etc.), but it works because the actors pull it off.

4The Place Beyond the Pines Derek Cianfrance follows up his brilliant Blue Valentine with a film bigger in scope but still starring Ryan Gosling, who plays Luke, a motorcycle stunt guy who finds out he has a kid and wants to be a part of his life. Problem is, the kid is the product of a one-night stand, and the mom (Eva Mendes) has moved on. Luke resorts to robbing banks, which culminates in a meeting with a rookie cop played by Bradley Cooper. The film then focuses on Cooper’s character for a segment before dealing with Luke and Avery’s kids (played by Dane DeHaan and Emory Cohen) when they are teens. The movie is long, but never boring, and it crackles most when Gosling is on screen. It’s all about the sins of the fathers, and Cianfrance presents it in a way that resonates. Also stars Ray Liotta and Ben Mendelsohn.

4Star Trek Into Darkness J.J. Abrams continues the great thing he started with his 2009 reboot of this beloved franchise. This time out, he gives us some more familiar characters from Trek history, but thanks to that ingeniously created alternate timeline, the people aren’t quite the same. Benedict Cumberbatch is scary as a renegade Starfleet officer looking to kill as many commanders as possible while Kirk (Chris Pine) and Spock (Zachary Quinto) chase him all over the universe. Peter Weller enters the fray as a power hungry admiral, with Alice Eve a welcome addition as his daughter and Enterprise stowaway. There are moments when Abrams goes a little overboard with his homage—I hate that tribble!—but it’s not enough to damage what turns out to be another worthy chapter to the franchise, and a solid summer movie.

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