Everyone’s favorite dim-witted cops are back, but unfortunately, they seem to have forgotten what made them funny in the first place. As a longtime fan of these doofus highway patrol officers, I never expected the third installment in the franchise to be a slam dunk. But “Super Troopers 3” turns out to be a disappointment of epic proportions.
The story finds Farva (Kevin Heffernan) preparing for an absurdly over-the-top Indian wedding to Thorny’s (Jay Chandrasekhar) sister (Hannah Simone) after a bizarre road rage accident. While Thorny schemes to break them up, the rest of the gang (Paul Soter, Steve Lemme, Nat Faxon, and Erik Stolhanske) and a too-good-to-be-true new recruit (Andrew Dismukes) get tangled in a new drug ring.
There’s plenty of material here for a loose, ridiculous comedy. Instead, the movie turns it into an overstuffed, painfully dull chore that rarely resembles the scrappy cult classic that made the guys from Broken Lizard such a beloved comedy troupe.
The biggest problem is that the jokes simply aren’t funny. I think I laughed maybe three times and even then, I felt like I was forcing myself to. The humor leans heavily on recycled callbacks, crude gross-out gags and lazy ethnic jokes that feel less outrageous than simply dated. I don’t mind the nostalgia because we get it, these guys are older (and so are we). Apparently, they also forgot how to write jokes for themselves.
What makes the original “Super Troopers” work is its wonderfully stupid commitment to being about dimwit (but lovable) cops. The characters are idiots, but so many of the best jokes came from watching them abuse their authority, screw around on the job, and turn routine police work into elaborate nonsense. Here, the cop angle is strangely pushed to the side. Once you remove that, you’re left with a handful of familiar personalities desperately trying to recreate jokes that worked two decades ago.
And that’s the saddest part. I genuinely like these characters. I love that they tried to make a true buddy comedy. Broken Lizard clearly knows their alter egos inside and out, but the performances feel forced, as if the actors are trying to squeeze themselves back into personalities that no longer fit. The result is exaggerated and unnatural, occasionally resembling a bad improv sketch rather than the loose, spontaneous comedy that made the original so much fun.
The Farva and Thorny conflict should be the movie’s comic engine, especially with the nightmare scenario of Farva marrying into his family. But even that premise feels strangely underdeveloped, buried beneath the unnecessary drug ring storyline and a parade of jokes that seem to exist simply because someone remembered they worked at some point before.
There are movies that feel like nostalgic reunions, and then there are movies that feel like contractual obligations wearing nostalgia as a disguise. “Super Troopers 3” falls firmly into the latter category. It’s a lazy exercise in late-middle-age reminiscing that mistakes familiarity for comedy.
I wanted to like this. I really did. But loving these characters makes the disappointment sting even more. This isn’t just unfunny, but it’s a reminder of how much potential was wasted by a movie that never figures out why we loved the original in the first place.
By: Louisa Moore
Screen Zealots 