Super Troopers 2
1 star
Director: Jay Chandrasekhar
Stars: Jay Chandrasekhar, Kevin Heffernan, Steve Lemme
Duration: 99 mins
Class: 12
KRS Releasing Ltd
Super Troopers 2 is the sequel to, you guessed it, Super Troopers, a comedy released in 2001 which I must admit I’d never heard of.
The original featured a comedy troupe called Broken Lizard, consisting of Jay Chandrasekhar, Kevin Heffernan, Steve Lemme, Paul Soter and Erik Stolhanske. They are the Vermont State Troopers team, who get up to all sorts of shenanigans.
The film earned €30 million on a €13.5 million budget and opened to so-so reviews, and why it merited a sequel was a mystery to me until I learned that this instalment was crowdfunded – clearly, by fans of the original.
I would say it is aimed squarely at that crowd who will have no problems sitting through 100 minutes chock-full of penis gags, fart jokes, terrible French accents, and no care at all for narrative, character development or any humour that hasn’t been regurgitated from a 100 previous efforts.
The premise for the screenplay, written by the members of the returning troupe, has the ex-troopers (having lost their jobs in the interim) offered a chance at redemption by Governor Jessman (Lynda Carter, reprising her role from the first film.)
They are assigned to take over the law enforcement in a tiny French-speaking town on the Canadian-US border. Said town is soon to become part of the US, following the discovery of error made when the border was drawn up (I kid you not).
We were barely three minutes into the film when I began to wish I was somewhere else. But I willed myself to hang in there, hoping we’d get to the humour that allegedly made the original film a cult comedy classic.
Needless to say, it didn’t happen and things only got worse as, what passes for a plot line, develops and the officers find themselves investigating a smuggling ring while bickering with a trio of disgruntled Royal Canadian Mounted Policemen.
The filmmakers think they are onto something wildly funny and original but miss the mark spectacularly at every turn
It’s timely that this film is being released a few days after a tense G7 Summit which had Donald Trump at loggerheads with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. One of its running gags is the put-down of Canadians in general by the witless Americans, and I would hazard a guess that only Americans and Canadians would find this funny. Then again, maybe not, for I have no doubt there are millions of North Americans on both sides of the border whose sense of humour is much more sophisticated.
The filmmakers think they are onto something wildly funny and original but miss the mark spectacularly at every turn. We are supposed to chuckle appreciatively at the stream of toilet humour that is flushed our way. We are expected to rip our sides with laughter at two men kissing, and to find the wordplay on various French phrases extremely clever.
Plot lines like the one where the mayor operates a legal brothel, and one of the characters gets addicted to female hormone pills, are presented as comically edgy. But it’s all so breathtakingly redundant, the characters so irredeemably obnoxious, that the mind boggles that they couldn’t come up with anything better in 17 years.
I honestly cannot fathom what an actor of Brian Cox’s calibre is doing here. Not even the presence of the Scottish award-winning theatrical great can inject anything of cinematic or comedic value into this mediocrity. The same can be said of Rob Lowe, mugging his way through his role alternating between a dodgy French accent and an even dodgier American one. As for the rest of the cast, they put in zero effort, stumbling from one scene to the next, hoping that at any point of their crass, loud, lewd and leering behaviour the audience will care for what they are up to. But it is impossible to engage with such one-dimensional obnoxiousness.
The one star is for the bear, set upon the troopers, for summing up my feelings perfectly.