The first Hangover movie, in which four middle-class chums have a disastrous stag party in Las Vegas before one of their number marries in Los Angeles, was highly entertaining in a scabrously funny, calculatedly bad taste way. The second one more or less repeated the original plot in Bangkok with even more extreme jokes. Crude, uninventive, it was the sort of thing that gets bad taste a bad name, and proved even more popular at the box office.

The quartet's third excursion, which is said to complete a trilogy, drops the marriage theme and concentrates upon the three more settled of the friends escorting the retarded 42-year-old unholy fool Alan (Zach Galifianakis) to a sanatorium in Arizona. On the way they're abducted by gangster John Goodman, seeking revenge for crimes committed against him by our four heroes and the crazy oriental crook Leslie Chow (Ken Jeong) in the earlier films. With death facing them, they travel to Tijuana and Las Vegas, first accompanied by the tiresome Chow, then pursuing him.

The best two jokes, both ruthless, both involving death, occur in the first couple of minutes. The most problematic jokes occur in a scene cut into the final credits. Overall, it's not terrible by current comedic standards. Just a trifle undernourished, overlong and desperate.