Review: Super Troopers 2
They say that when you smoke too much weed, you get really lazy and stop laughing.
That experience is translated perfectly in Super Troopers 2. I laughed twice throughout the whole 100 minutes of Super Troopers 2. I know it was twice, because it wasn't hard to keep track.
Broken Lizard’s high-water mark, Beerfest, featured novel situations with ridiculous characters, and those characters responded to their circumstances in creative and funny ways. Super Troopers 2, however, feels more like the band on stage caving to the asshole in the back who kept screaming “Play ‘Freebird’” for their whole first set.
None of the actors from Broken Lizard, nor Brian Cox, who anchored the original, come across as though they want to be doing this. Cox, in particular, appears almost embarrassed in his scenes, and it’s doesn’t have much correlation with anything his fellow Troopers are doing in the film. It’s a general, “my agent will be fired” kind of embarrassment.
The energy the comedy troupe brought to their previous films is barely here, as the script is filled with callbacks to the first Super Troopers, to the point of recreating a good majority of the setups offered there. There is one neat callback to their previous films, though: one character has a “Pina Coladaburg” ringtone on their phone.
The laziness infects the script beyond the aping of the original film, though. Canadian jokes abound, with more cartoonish over-pronunciation than even being stoned off your ass could support laughter for. There are multiple instances where the punchline is merely the word, “pancakes,” and another where Rob Lowe, affecting yet another too enunciated accent, invokes the ghost of Tim Horton as Perry White of the Daily Planet would Caesar. And that’s not even addressing the plethora of one-note gay jokes throughout the movie.
It’s pretty fair to say that the members of Broken Lizard, whom are credited with writing Super Troopers 2 collectively, have regressed rather than grown, as comedians, this film being the solid proof. They may have gotten a better cinematographer than in the first Super Troopers, and their budget was clearly larger, going by all the cameos (Fred Savage! Seann William Scott! Damon Wayans Jr.! Lynda Carter!), but the product certainly not any better for it.
Super Troopers 2’s one interesting setup, that the Troopers believe all Canadians to be unfailingly polite, and that those Canadians aren’t, isn’t even used all that creatively. It’s used as the entire joke, and not even for some “they’re just like us” kind of point. They’re just assholes out in the back country of Ontario/Vermont because they don’t like change. Again, this point could’ve been brought in to mirror the Troopers for some comedy.
But I’ve already put more thought into this movie than Broken Lizard. It pains me to rake a movie over the coals, that would’ve been a slam dunk for me a decade ago. But nobody, not the troupe, Rob Lowe, Brian Cox, or Emmanuelle Chriqui, wasted in a love interest/double cross role, makes it out of this one unscathed.
There is not enough marijuana in Willie Nelson’s tour bus to make this movie funny enough to recommend to anyone.
