The Hangover Part III

Alan has never been particularly interested in behaving like everybody else.

But by the beginning of Part III, his recklessness has stopped being merely eccentric.

His latest disastrous decision is to buy a giraffe and transport it along the freeway.

It goes about as well as you'd expect.

Then Alan's father dies.

The loss leaves him even more adrift, and the people closest to him realise that something needs to change.

Phil, Stu and Doug agree to help take Alan to a facility where he can receive treatment.

For once, the Wolfpack is attempting to prevent a catastrophe rather than recover from one.

That lasts approximately as long as you'd expect.

On the way to Arizona, the Wolfpack is forced off the road.

Masked men surround them.

Their leader is Marshall, a criminal figure with unfinished business involving Leslie Chow.

Years earlier, Chow stole millions of dollars in gold from him.

Marshall knows Alan has remained in contact with Chow.

So he gives the group a job.

Find Chow.

Recover the gold.

And to make sure they cooperate, Marshall takes Doug hostage.

Yes.

Doug is missing again.

At this point, the man really should stop travelling with these people.

Alan has kept in contact with Chow in secret.

Of course he has.

That gives the Wolfpack a way to arrange a meeting.

Unfortunately, dealing with Chow has never been easy.

Ken Jeong's character has evolved from the furious stranger jumping out of a car boot in the first film into the chaotic force connecting the entire trilogy.

Phil and Stu don't trust him.

Marshall wants him.

Alan considers him a friend.

All three positions are completely understandable.

Chow convinces the group to help retrieve gold hidden inside a Mexican villa.

What initially sounds like a dangerous burglary gets much worse when Phil, Stu, and Alan discover they've been manipulated.

The house isn't simply somewhere Chow stored the stolen gold.

It belongs to Marshall.

Chow takes what he wants and disappears again, leaving the Wolfpack to deal with the consequences.

It's vintage Chow.

And now Marshall is even less amused than before.

The search eventually takes Phil, Stu and Alan back to Las Vegas.

Back to the city where everything started.

The location gives the final film a deliberate sense of coming full circle.

Caesars Palace isn't simply another setting anymore.

It's practically a crime scene from the Wolfpack's collective past.

They've been here before.

They've lost people here before.

They've made spectacularly poor decisions here before.

And now Chow is somewhere above them.

Tracking Chow leads to a penthouse high above Las Vegas.

Getting inside requires a plan that once again demonstrates how far Phil is willing to go when one of his friends is in trouble.

He descends from the roof using bedsheets.

Hundreds of feet above the Strip.

It's exactly the sort of decision that would seem completely insane in almost any other franchise.

After two Hangover movies, it somehow feels logical.

The Wolfpack has developed its own definition of problem-solving.

Alan's friendship with Chow has always been strange.

He admires him.

Chow encourages Alan's worst impulses.

And neither man possesses anything resembling a sensible internal warning system.

But eventually Alan has to recognise what Phil and Stu have understood for years.

Chow brings chaos.

Their friendship isn't harmless.

To move forward, Alan needs to leave some things behind.

Including Leslie Chow.

Amid the criminal insanity, Alan meets Cassie.

She works at a pawn shop when the group tries to track down information connected to Chow.

And something unexpected happens.

They like each other.

Melissa McCarthy's Cassie meets Alan at exactly his wavelength. Their interaction is strange, confrontational and oddly sweet.

For perhaps the first time in the trilogy, Alan meets someone who doesn't simply tolerate his personality.

She seems to genuinely enjoy it.

That becomes surprisingly important to where his story ends.

Doug spends much of the third film doing what Doug does remarkably well.

Being kidnapped.

Justin Bartha's character has become a running joke in the trilogy: despite supposedly being part of the group, he repeatedly spends huge portions of their adventures separated from them.

But Phil, Stu and Alan never abandon him.

Whatever else can be said about the Wolfpack, loyalty isn't the problem.

They cause disasters together.

And then they get one another home.

The emotional conclusion belongs to Alan.

Across the trilogy, Phil and Stu have built families and settled into adult lives.

Alan has remained Alan.

But meeting Cassie gives him something new.

When the group gathers for Alan's wedding, he announces that things will change.

He won't be able to spend as much time with the guys anymore.

For once, Alan is the one moving forward.

The Wolfpack isn't ending because they've fallen apart.

It's ending because Alan finally has somewhere else to belong.

For a moment, The Hangover Part III appears to give the trilogy an unexpectedly calm ending.

Alan is married.

Phil and Stu are safe. Doug isn't missing, Chow is out of their lives.

Everything is fine. Then comes the morning after. The hotel room is destroyed.

Nobody knows what happened.

Stu has undergone a rather dramatic physical change.

And Chow appears from the next room.

Apparently, the universe simply refuses to let these men celebrate anything normally.

It's one final reminder of exactly where the trilogy began.

The third movie deliberately breaks from the structure used by the first two.

No central blackout mystery drives the story.

Instead, it turns the earlier films' consequences into the plot itself.

Chow, Alan's friendship with him and the criminal chaos surrounding the Wolfpack finally collide.

That makes Part III feel different from its predecessors while still bringing the characters back to familiar territory.

Especially Las Vegas.

The place where everything went wrong in 2009 becomes the place where the trilogy finally says goodbye.

Across three films, the Wolfpack survived Las Vegas, Bangkok, kidnappings, criminals, missing teeth, tattoos, a tiger, a monkey and Leslie Chow.

But the trilogy ultimately belongs to Phil, Stu and Alan.

Their friendship is ridiculous but strangely durable.

Phil tries to keep everyone moving.

Stu panics.

Alan causes approximately 80 percent of the problems.

Then somehow they solve the disaster together.

The Hangover Part III closes that story by finally allowing Alan to change.

Not completely, obviously.

That would be asking far too much.

But enough.

After three movies and several catastrophically bad decisions, the Wolfpack finally gets to go home.

Probably for the best.