"The Hangover Part III" hits theaters this weekend. While the movie is sure to draw a sizeable number at the box office, according to Variety it made $3.1 million on midnight showings Wednesday, roughly the same number "Star Trek Into Darkness" made last week, critics are not being generous to the last film of the trilogy.
RottenTomatoes.com, a website that combines hundreds of different reviews from all over the country and scores a film on percent scale with 100 percent being the top, has given the new film a score of 24 percent.
A combination of dismay and confusion over the lack of humor in the film seems to be the one unifying element of most of the reviews. In a review simply titled "What happened to the Jokes?" Deadspin's Will Leitch seems to be perplexed as to what exactly is supposed to be funny in the film.
"What's strangest about The Hangover Part III is how, well, not funny it is," Leitch wrote. "I don't mean that it makes a bunch of jokes that don't work; I mean that there are not a lot of jokes."
Andrew Barker of Variety described the film as "nearly bereft of laughs" and that it is debatable whether the film should be considered a comedy. While the second film in the series was heavily criticized for following the formula of the first film almost identically Barker blasts the new one purposely straying from that formula.
"Ditching the hangovers, the backwards structure, the fleshed-out characters and any sense of debauchery or fun, this installment instead just thrusts its long-suffering protagonists into a rote chase narrative, periodically trotting out fan favorites for a curtain call," Barker wrote.
Probably the most cutting of all of the reviews was given by Rafer Guzman of Newsday.
"It's 'The Hangover Part III,' billed as the end of a trilogy that began with 2009's "The Hangover," and it seems to have one goal: to be so dark, nasty and joyless that audiences won't want Part IV."
