Super Troopers 2: Seventh Grade Me Is So Happy Right Meow

I saw Super Troopers in seventh grade. My grandmother dropped me off at the theater to see something else- I dunno, probably Spy Kids or something. But I snuck into Super Troopers and it was one of the best movie-going experiences of my entire life. It was the first movie I ever snuck into. It was the first R-rated movie I'd ever seen in theaters. And it was the first movie I'd ever seen alone. From the very beginning, when the trio of stoners are pranked by the "serious" highway patrolmen, I was laughing so hard I had to quiet down for fear of being noticed and kicked out. Super Troopers will always have a special place in my heart. I've seen it dozens of times and every time I watch it, it brings back those moments of glee from seventh grade me watching it alone in the theater and I can't help but laugh. However, this is the problem with waiting 17 years to do a sequel to a comedy-- comedy evolves. Look at the last few comedic sequels that waited 10-20 plus years before offering the world a second helping. How have they fared? Anchorman 2, Zoolander 2, and Dumb and Dumber To were not very good movies. We saw them, and even convinced ourselves we liked them because the originals were such iconic and original films when they first came out. They defined the comedy brand of their time-- but the comedy brand evolves quickly. If one waits too long to make a sequel to the funny... the funny isn't funny anymore. After Will Ferrell made Anchorman he made Talladega Nights which was in the same humor-vein that Anchorman was. Then he made Blades of Glory, then Stepbrothers... then it kind of fizzled out. When was the last time you saw a Will Ferrell movie like that? He's had to adapt to the times. Ben Stiller doesn't make "character based" movies anymore and Jim Carrey apparently just doesn't make movies anymore. Comedy evolved past these humors. Hell, as sad as it is to think about... even the Seth Rogen/Apatow crew aren't churning out movies like they used to. Comedy is an ever-evolving thing, so sequels need to happen immediately... or not at all. Super Troopers made the seventh grader in me so happy... because that's where the humor is at. It's 2001 humor in 2018 and anyone who's not a die-hard fan of the first film isn't going to enjoy this latest entry.

The troopers are back! All five, comprised of comedy troupe Broken Lizard. Our favorite stoner cops, Thorny (Jay Chandrasekhar), Mac (Steve Lemme), Foster (Paul Soter), Rabbit (Erik Stolhanske), and of course, Rod Farva (Kevin Heffernan). If you recall, their Vermont highway patrol station had been shut down and they became local cops. Now, they're all working odd jobs, but none are cops anymore (due to what is only known as the "Fred Savage incident"). However, the governor of Vermont (Lynda Carter) has learned that the border between Vermont and Canada actually extends more north. A small Canadian region is now an American region, and needs a small police force in order to smooth over the transition of Canada to America. So... she recruits our troopers. From there, it's a series of gags, puns, and a shit-load of Canadian jokes (seriously, I didn't realize how much material you could generate from jokes about Canada). Rob Lowe plays the Mayor of Canada who runs a Hockey bar/brothel. Will Sasso, Hayes MacArthur, and Tyler Labine play French-Canadian Mounties hired to show the troopers around, even though they're losing their jobs. And Emmanuelle Chriqui is a French woman who has something to do with the plot, but I'm not entirely sure. There's also a sub-"plot" involving drug smuggling that they tackle briefly, but mostly it's just there to keep it looking like an actual movie.

I had a hard time dealing with the fact that Super Troopers 2 isn't a very good movie. Because Broken Lizard is very important to me. They're one of the very few comedy troupes still making movies-- and they haven't even made one in close to ten years. They had commercial success with Super Troopers, elevated their game to Club Dread, leading to the culmination of their careers in Beerfest which is arguably the best movie they've done. Then... they fizzled out. How many of you saw (or even heard of The Slammin Salmon)? Exactly. It was their Beerfest follow-up and it felt like a movie they could've made in college. Clearly, studios weren't trusting them enough to give them any real money and it cost us a chance at seeing if they could surpass Beerfest before becoming irrelevant. They had to use Indiegogo and crowd-source the money to get Super Troopers 2 made, and that's a shame. Because now, they've been out of the spotlight so long, they can only resort to making the same jokes and playing up the same humor that was in style over 17 years ago. Comedy evolved, but studios wouldn't let Broken Lizard evolve with it.

Something I've noticed about comedy sequels that are made decades after its predecessor-- there is a weird thing where they have to try to keep the characters the same... call back to a lot of the old jokes... and try to make it feel relevant in the new era. Super Troopers succumbs to this trend as well, though they somehow succeed backwards. The call backs (which never really work because the joke is already known) are some of the funniest parts of Super Troopers 2. Somehow, they've been able to take old jokes, use them again in a new time, and they're funnier than most other stuff in the film. However, it's when they try to make jokes adhering to what's relevant now-- is when the film fails. The movie feels like a couple of high school stoners got together and tried to write a movie with humor from 2001. For example, one of the most disappointing parts of this film is what they did with Thorny's character. I've always been a fan of Jay Chandrasekhar and I think he is the strength of the Broken Lizard gang, but his character, in the midst of the drug smuggling case, takes a female boner-pill called "Flova Scotia" and winds up having "female traits"-- like bitchiness, being overly-emotional, and having a bad sense of driving direction. These stereotyped jokes about females were tired in 2001, but maybe would've illicited a laugh or two. In 2018, they're beyond unfunny, they're offensive.

That's how a lot of the humor goes in Super Troopers 2. It's strange the different chasms of comedy they rely on for laughs-- like pun-based jokes. Don't get me wrong, I love pun-based humor, especially when it's used well. But when it's relied on for nearly 75% of the dialogue of your main characters, it becomes tedious and eye-rollingly bad. Seriously, I don't remember everyone just speaking in puns in the first movie, right? Poor Foster... all he really gets to do is keep bringing up why purchasing a police "Triangulator" was a good idea... funny? There's endless jokes about Canadians which runs its course well before the movie is even half over. Which reminds me-- in Beerfest, one of the best parts is the Broken Lizard characters had German rivals played by American comedians doing hilariously bad German accents-- and it was HILARIOUS. It worked. Here, the Broken Lizard characters have Canadian rivals played by American comedians doing humorously bad Canadian accents-- and it's just meh. There's really only one scene with them that got me rolling and it had to do with an argument over who Danny DeVito is. It's that weird kind of humor that made Broken Lizard so popular-- not archaic stereotypes about women or dialogue filled with over-used puns. The first movie worked so well because they gave each member of the troupe a different, fun quirk, which all came together to produce this magic comedy energy each member could feed off of. Now, they all have the same quirk, while trying to add a new quirk and it's just kind of disjointed.

There are some very funny moments, however. Throughout a lot of the tired and dated humor are moments that had me laughing now just as hard as I did back then. But they're so few and far between. However, there is one thing Super Troopers 2 does better than every other comedy sequel that came out well past its expiration date. Most of these comedy films know who the breakout star of the movie was. In Anchorman, yes Ron Burgandy was the comedic focal point-- but he wasn't the funniest character of the movie. That was Brick Tamland played by Steve Carell. So, what did Anchorman 2 do? They over-used the character, tried to give him more to do (even though the character Brick worked best when just in the background) and wound up making him the most annoying, irritating character in the sequel. I anticipated this is what would happen with Farva. They know he's the fan favorite and he's got to be the most fun character to write because he's such a blowhard asshole. However, not only did they not kill the character's comedy... he's the best part of the movie. They give him more to do, they up the ante on his obnoxiousness... and it works. All of the best and funniest moments of Super Troopers 2 involve Farva in some way. And this is why the film is not a total loss.

So, what can I say about the movie that you don't already know? No. It's not even close to as good as the first film. Yes, if you loved the first movie, there is plenty in here for you to like, but you're not going to leave fulfilled-- you're going to leave with this aura of disappointment. Probably the same disappointment you were hoping wasn't going to happen before you sat down to watch the film. The jokes that don't hit (and there are a lot of them) just aren't elevated enough to warrant many laughs. There's so much they could've done with the movie. Thorny lactating from female estrogen pills isn't funny. There's a scene in which a bear enters their station, which was ripe for any number of comedic situations winds up turning into nothing but Farva ending up in a porta-potty and getting knocked over... which isn't funny. The end reveal of what "actually" happened to Fred Savage (which could've been one more HUGE laugh) is such a let down that you realize this movie is trapped in 2001. Had this movie come out a year after Super Troopers was released, it may have been received just as well as the first one. But too much time has gone by, too much in pop culture has evolved and the only people that are going to appreciate the movie are our former seventh grade selves who found the first film as funny as it was. I do hope this movie makes money so Broken Lizard is able to continue making new movies instead of resorting to sequels, but I hope this is the last incantation of Super Troopers we ever get.

C