Super Troopers

Written and Starring by Broken Lizard
Directed by Jay Chandrasekhar
website: www.foxsearchlight.com

IN SHORT: T'ain't nothing super about it. [Rated R for language, sexual content and drug use. 100 minutes]

Brought to you by a comedy troupe called Broken Lizard: Jay Chandrasekhar, Kevin Heffernan, Steve Lemme, Paul Soter and Erik Stolhanske, who teamed while students at Colgate University. This is their second film as a group. The first got almost no distribution and this one should've followed suit. It isn't that this band of brothers has made a lackluster effort. There is a workable story as the framework of this comedy. The problem is, there's no comedy sitting on top of that framework.

Then again, we saw this flick stone cold sober. No doubt the creators were counting on attracting a crowd Thai-stick'ed out of their minds. Now, we have first hand experience with being Thai-stick'ed out of our minds and we've sat through comedies which were decidedly enhanced by our advanced states. We've got a good gut feeling for what works with enhancement and Super Troopers still doesn't fit that category. The story, devolving from a gag that goes "Could you imagine what it would be like if you saw somebody ****ing a bear by the side of the road?," involves a group of fratboy minded Vermont State Troopers who, faced with the loss of their jobs, don't do a helluva lot to follow the rules and prove that their continued employment is necessary for the well being of the State of Vermont. The evil enemy are the local cops of Spudbury, whose dispatch officer Hanson (Marisa Coughlan) provides the sexual spark for the movie. Pursued by Trooper Foster (the redhead Lizard), and totally oblivious, our femme fatale eventually falls for the trooper's charms. Their encounters almost provide some humor in this movie -- enhancement would help.

The rest of the deal involves a marijuana smuggler and the Troopers discovery of a cache of pot that the locals haven't reported as captured. Every sober person who can figure this tricky story out, raise your hands. . .

. . . three million, four million, five million, OK enough. We've made the point.

Of course we didn't laugh at the first Austin Powers movie either. The big difference between the two, and the reason our gut feeling is that this is the a true misfire, is that AP didn't have to resort to the kind of language that Super Troopers does. Troopers wants its "R" rating badly, and it gets it from language and a whole lot of sagging male buttocks shots. There's a painfully bad bit about a horny German couple who will do "anything" to avoid a ticket but it, like many of the other attempts at humor, doesn't interact with the rest of the story. Indeed, when the Lizards keep coming back to the couple, there's nothing in the movie to indicate what happened between segments. It's all slap dash moviemaking and although the blonde German fraulein is quite attractive, there ain't enough T&A on her part to keep the teenboys happy. There sure wasn't enough to keep those of teenboy daddy age happy.

Linda Carter plays the Governor of Vermont. I sure hope she got a paycheck bigger than the state (and with all the talk of Sandra Bullock doing a Wonder Woman movie, let's go on the record and say Carter's still got "it".)

On average, a first run movie ticket will run you Nine Bucks. Were Cranky able to set his own price to Super Troopers, he would have paid . . .

$0.00

We'd call it an udder waste of time . . . but that tired old line is funnier than almost anything in this utter waste of time.

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