Super Troopers 2

Super Troopers 2 is aggressively stupid.  Watching it, you can't help but feel the filmmakers want to inflict groans from the audience with some of the jokes.  I get that this is the point of the movie.  It's supposed to be dumb fun, and a goofy time at the movies.  But the movie is also aggressively lame, labored and unfunny.  It's the kind of movie that thinks jokes about Canadians talking funny, listening to Rush and the Barenaked Ladies, and eating nothing but pancakes are funny.

Just like the first film from 2002, the movie follows the misadventures of a bunch of seemingly straight-laced cops, who are actually a bunch of goofballs, druggies, dimwits and drunks.  They like to play pranks on each other, and on the unsuspecting motorists they pull over.  This time, the action is set in Canada, so we get a parade of jokes about the metric system, speaking French, and saying "about" and "sorry" in a funny accent.  And since this is a low brow comedy, we also get gags about shaved testicles, as well as one of the cops becoming addicted to female hormone pills, which makes him incredibly irritable, and unable to follow directions when he's driving.  It wants to be over the top and intentionally dumb, but there's so little life to the humor, it misses the mark and simply becomes tedious and dumb.

The guys who make up the comedy group Broken Lizard return as the film's writers and stars.  They seem a lot older (the original movie did come out 16 years ago), and not as into this kind of humor.  They're doing this one strictly for the fans.  After all, it was the fans who made this movie possible, as they crowd-sourced the budget for it.  The whole movie feels like you're watching a bunch of middle aged comics trying to crack each other up with Middle School-level humor.  Maybe it was fun for them to get to play these characters again, and just goof around with each other for a few weeks.  But the experience of watching it feels like you're watching a movie from another era being performed by comics who are past their prime.  Maybe the fans who helped back this sequel will find that they have grown beyond these jokes, and want to keep the original movie in the past.

The plot (as if it really matters) finds that the cops have been stripped of their jobs after something called "the Fred Savage Incident", and are working as construction workers.  This brings about a repeated joke where one of the guys keeps on saying, "grab your caulk".  Yes, the movie acknowledges that it's a bad joke, but that doesn't make it any better or funnier.  But then it's discovered that the northern tip of Vermont actually pokes up into Canadian territory, thereby making it American soil.  The state's governor (Lynda Carter) hires the boys back as cops in order to patrol the area until the transition is complete.  The main gag of the film is that the Canadians are not as nice as the cops initially think they will be, and are actually hostile toward them.  This even includes the mayor of the local area (Rob Lowe), and a trio of disgraced Canadian Mounties.

As Super Troopers 2 drudges on, it becomes all the more dated and lame.  The movie doesn't even succeed at being "edgy" or crude.  This movie's idea of crude humor is to show two guys kissing each other.  We not only get that, but we also get a scene where one of the cops has to give "mouth to mouth" to another guy who is unconscious, and how it's just like kissing.  Do men still find this kind of humor shocking or outrageous?  Between all the lame Canada jokes, and the tired homophobic humor, you have to wonder if these really were the best jokes they could dream up.  The sad truth is, I believe so.  Since the movie has barely any resemblance of a plot (there's something about drug and gun smuggling), I believe that the Broken Lizard team thought this kind of humor was strong enough to support an entire 100 minute film.

But then, this movie wasn't made for me.  It's made for the people who hold the original as a comedy classic.  If you're part of that group, you might get enough enjoyment out of seeing these characters again.  Just expect some diminishing returns to go with it.  As for me, I will leave this movie to you, while I do my best to try to forget it.

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