Super Troopers

The five-man comedy group known as Broken Lizard, who are responsible for Super Troopers, originally banded together as undergraduates at Colgate University — a fact that shakes one’s faith in higher learning. At the same time, Super Troopers (at least according to the publicity boys) was a surprise hit at the Sundance Film Festival — a fact that shakes one’s faith in Sundance. As someone who has slogged his way through nearly every comedy that’s come out in the past year-and-a-half, I’ll concede that Super Troopers is nowhere near the worst of the breed. It’s no Slackers, no Freddy Got Fingered, no Not Another Teen Movie, no Joe Dirt, and it’s certainly no Pootie Tang. But then, that could be said of a sub-par episode of My Mother the Car, so that’s no great accomplishment. By any other than severely relative standards, it’s pretty grisly. I suppose a movie wherein a bored state trooper uses a speed gun to clock how fast his hand is moving in the performance of an act not — one hopes — generally found in police procedural manuals fulfills some kind of a long-felt want, but I’ve never myself felt that want. And I don’t feel especially enriched for having seen it played out. I’ll give this patchwork mess credit for at least having the courage not to pretend it’s really anything other than a lot of frat-boy skits strung together on a flimsy premise. There is a plot, but it doesn’t much matter and it doesn’t entirely make sense. Why would a gang of five state troopers with a penchant for what they call “shenanigans” continue to behave in the most outrageous possible manner, when they know their jobs are all on the line and they’re under unusually close scrutiny? They wouldn’t, of course, but if they didn’t there’d be no movie, so they have to keep doing these things even though they make no sense. However, much of what goes on in the movie makes no sense. Granted, a highway patrol station might have holding cells, but would they actually have cells in which to incarcerate people for more than a few hours? The movie doesn’t seem to care, and in one sense that’s almost refreshing — or it would be if Super Troopers had the wit to let us know that it doesn’t care. Instead, the results just come off as sloppy and cheesy — albeit very occasionally amusing. The opening sequence very nearly works — with two of our heroes pulling over a group of pretty grubby stoners and playing almost surreal mind games with them — but this quickly palls because it’s the template for nearly every damned gag in the movie. There’s also a pretty amusing sequence where a trooper replaces the word “now” with “meow” as he hassles a hapless motorist — who naturally can’t keep from laughing, and gets hassled for that. But this is a minor pleasure in a film with very little pleasure going for it. Worse, the Broken Lizard boys have less than no sense of comedic timing as performers. This is exacerbated by the fact that the film is edited to allow time for the audience to laugh after each joke and when the laughter doesn’t come, the effect is painfully embarrassing. Mostly, it’s a lame string of juvenilia passing for humor and gross-out gags being fobbed off as wit. At 103 minutes, it’s almost unbearably overlong.