Super Troopers 2
OPENING TODAY
★★★
Super Troopers 2
Comedy sequels have a terrible track record, but it’s always curious when they appear years or even decades after the original. Films like Zoolander 2, Blues Brothers 2000 and Dumb and Dumber To are textbook examples of trying to cash in on fan nostalgia. In these cases, the originals become cult classics because the outlandish characters are large enough to sustain a film. There’s enough material to warrant repeated watching and the movie becomes ubiquitous; shared cultural currency in the public sphere for years.
The original Super Troopers is just such a film. Broken Lizard created a perfect stoner comedy that relished the comedy troupe’s silliness and idiocy. The unexpected inanity — like Paul Soter’s incessant “meow” to Jim Gaffigan — felt so fresh and charming that it balanced out weaker parts of the film. Yet the film’s cultlike status has long captivated fans, especially as Broken Lizard’s subsequent movies never lived up to the same potential. No matter how terrible it would be, fans would always want another Super Troopers.
Seventeen years after the original, with $4.4 million of crowdfunding money, the simply titled Super Troopers 2 is here — on 4/20, no less. And yet, the sequel has not a whiff of marijuana smoke. It’s louder, cruder and even more inane than the original, especially its brash opening, which features a dead body with the irreverence expected of sketch comedy, not a film. Logic is thrown out the window entirely in Super Troopers 2. The premise involves the original team — Thorny (Jay Chandrasekhar), Foster (Soter), Mac (Steve Lemme), Rabbit (Erik Stolhanske), Farva (Kevin Heffernan), plus the old Captain (Brian Cox) — assisting the transition of a part of Quebec originally belonging to the U.S. being transferred back into American hands.
The ludicrous conceit opens a Pandora’s box of cheap Canadian insults — about Rush and the Barenaked Ladies (clearly Broken Lizard hasn’t heard Drake yet), those cartoony Quebecois accents, old-fashioned Mountie uniforms, and so on. Though it might be painful to admit, some of the jokes work. Often when Americans make fun of Canadians they never get past these superficial elements. Broken Lizard, on the other hand, creates a pretty hilarious tension between the freedom-loving Americans who seem actually taken aback by the presence of a legal brothel — owned by the town mayor, no less, (Rob Lowe in a chintzy wig and exuding a certain sleazy charm that now feels familiar thanks to our country’s more memorable mayors) — and the American-hating francophones.
And for once in a movie, Canadians actually fight back. We’re not nice. We’re not “soar-y.” The audience I watched this with roared with appreciation when the Mounties attacked the Super Troopers for their country’s gun violence, morbidly obese population and lack of health care. Non-Canadian fans may not get anywhere near as much delight, as the rest of the humour is either offensive — one awful running gag features Thorny becoming addicted to an estrogen therapy pill called “Flova Scotia” that makes him take on unfunny supposedly “female” traits — or simply outdated locker-room antics.
A montage devoted to supposedly fresh takes on the troupe’s signature, pulled-over-by-the-cops jokes that made the original so much fun rarely land. And strangely, the comedians didn’t think to revive the syrup-chugging gag in their Canadian-set film. Regardless, Super Troopers 2 is surprisingly fresher and more put-together than one might expect from an aging, exceptionally silly, one-hit wonder comedy troupe. ★★★