The Hangover Part 3 is terrible

Ok, so I finally broke down and watched this movie.

I own the first two, I had hopes that the last movie of the trilogy would be a pleasant send-off to the franchise.

I was terribly wrong.

Firstly, it breaks the previously established formula, in a bad way. In the previous two movies all of the action took place the day after a blackout bender where the three members of the "Wolfpack" try to piece together what it was they did the previous night, while trying to find their lost fourth member.

In Part 3 there is no blackout hangover. Instead there is a ridiculous criminal conspiracy. For no logical reason. The wolfpack gets sucked into the conspiracy because apparently all mobsters are criminally inept.

So the plot has more in common with Ocean's 11 than it does The Hangover.

But the major problem with The Hangover 3 is that it wasn't at all fun.
The first two were hilarious because of the mystery and discovering at each new clue exactly how ridiculously drunk the boys were the previous night. The classic ending to the first two movies being a slideshow of recovered camera photos from the bender.

This third movie had no slideshow. Because there was no bender. There was no awesome experience that they wish they could remember. Just a bunch of awful interactions with criminals that they wish they could forget.

The filmmakers received alot of flak for making part 2 just a ramped up version of part 1. But after seeing three, they really should have stuck to the formula.


And as a bonus, I'm also reviewing Warm Bodies:

Ok, so this one I'm much more pleased with. It's not a great movie, but it's very cute. Somewhere, someone had the bright idea "Hey, why don't we combine Romeo & Juliet with Zombies?"

Honestly, I wouldn't have done it. There are other Shakespearean plays that much more easily lend themselves to a zombie apocalypse. But it had cute romance and vicious zombie horror.
Which is my one major complaint. It's like they tried to make the perfect "Date movie" that had romance for girls and action for guys. The problem is that they both detract from the other. The romance reduced the suspense of Zombie horror, and the Horror added anxiety to the romance.

So they tried to do two things at once, and ended up being ok at both. The Zombie Horror wasn't all that scary, and the Romance was a bit off-putting. But it worked out, kinda.

I'd watch it again, but not sure I'd recommend it to anyone.

Reviewing two terrible movies.

It's that time again. Your lovable Jester suffers through awful movies, and then makes fun of them.
On tonight's Menu:
Win a date with Tad Hamilton.
&
Catwoman.

Yeah, I really suffered for you all this week.

Ok, Wadwth. This is a pretty awful movie. It's the typical Cyrano-esque love triangle where two guys are into one girl, one guy is smart, the other is good looking.
But the "Smart" guy is Topher Grace.
I'm not sure who decided that Eric Foreman deserved a movie career, but he really needs to go back to TV.

For a brief moment I thought this movie might be going somewhere interesting. The "Wise Bartender" played by Kathyrn Hahn, is probably the character in the movie with the most depth. She's the real Cyrano in this story. She's in love with Topher Grace's character who is in love with yet another woman who is herself in love with a movie star.
Yeah, got that?
But here's the amazing part. The bartender advises the man she loves to go chase after the woman he loves, after confessing her love to him. She tells him that his happiness is more important to her than her getting her way.
That's amazingly self-sacrificing.
But of course he ditches the amazing bartender and gets the girl he wanted after she breaks up with the movie star.
The end of the movie is Topher Grace and the female lead dancing in the middle of a road after they finally decide to be together.

Totally boring ending, I'm actually kinda glad the bartender didn't get with him, he's a schmuck.

Then there was Catwoman. Or "Halle Berry attempting to turn her X-Men success into a solo action-star success."

This movie was dreadful.

The character of Catwoman is like a weird letter to Playboy. She's bizarrely hyper-sexual, and completely filled with cat-like behaviors. She purrs, hisses, claws people, licks people, and she's afraid of the rain.

So already really dumb.

Then apparently they couldn't figure a way to do any of the stunts that they wanted Catwoman to do, so they just did her as CGI for half the movie. Every action scene only included Halle Berry on close-up shots or when she was posing between ninja backflips.

So this movie is ridiculous, but it's also terrible. The hero is completely unsympathetic, the "Final villain" is the abused wife of the initial villain. So her change from abused wife to psychopath appears totally random. She's a helpful victim for the first 3/4 of the movie then for the last 1/4 she turns psycho super-villain. Makes no sense, and completely idiotic.
Highlight: Alex Borstein as the ditzy best friend. She was probably the only enjoyable part of the movie.

Final thoughts:
Avoid both of these movies. They were mistakes that they were even made.
Wadwth had a production cost of $22 Million (Probably around $44 million if you include marketing) and it's only made $21 million world-wide to-date.
Catwoman had a production budget of $100 million ($200 mil after marketing) and it only made $82 million world-wide.
So both movies lost money, Catwoman lost alot of money.

Compared to "John Carter" Disney's biggest marketing (or lack thereof) failure. It cost $250 million to make (with minimal marketing added on) and it made $282 million world wide. That movie killed Taylor Kitsch's career, but compared to Catwoman, he actually did pretty well.
I'm amazed that Halle Berry can still find work at all these days after a blunder that big. It's well-established that she's "Hollywood poison" with a Q-rating of "Zero" (even with her Oscar). But dear god, she should have a negative score after Catwoman.