Super Troopers 3

Earlier this summer, Jackass: Best and Last demonstrated that, even with the passing of the years, Johnny Knoxville and his comrades still love making each other laugh by bizarrely and hilariously risking their lives in ridiculous stunts. By comparison, the Broken Lizard comedy troupe gives us Super Troopers 3; three decades after their breakthrough feature Puddle Jumper, these dudes still apparently enjoy each other’s company, but they seem to be exerting minimal effort to create actual comedy.

The first Super Troopers was a delightfully silly comedy about Vermont state troopers, with just enough plot to accommodate the barrage of goofy gags, wordplay, and absurdist bits that made the movie so rewatchable. A quarter of a century later, there’s an overwhelming amount of plot and not nearly enough laughs.

Sarita (Hannah Simone, New Girl), the college-professor sister of trooper Thorny (Jay Chandrasekhar, who also directs), comes to town as a visiting lecturer, but on her way in, she’s run off the road. Just before her SUV explodes, she’s rescued by mega-doofus trooper Farva (Kevin Heffernan) and, much to Thorny’s chagrin, it’s love at first sight. Thorny does what he can to torpedo their eventual engagement, but somehow Farva — despite being previously (and currently) portrayed as an obnoxious buffoon — manages to completely charm Thorny’s traditionalist Indian parents (Sakina Jaffrey and Iqbal Theba).

The screenplay by the five-person Broken Lizard collective piles on lots more story, including the training of a new rookie (Andrew Dismukes); marital friction between Foster (Paul Soter) and Ursula (Marisa Coughlin); the arrival of a new Canadian-made electric patrol car; Mac (Steve Lemme) grappling with aging; a pair of former weed dealers (Chace Crawford and Jon Rudnitsky) who now own one of those barn-inclusive wedding venues; the influx of a new drug called Canadian Crystal; the vandalization of out-of-state syrup trucks; and the inability of the troop’s retired captain (Brian Cox) to stop hanging around headquarters.

The Lizards have built a platform for comedy, but most of the humor fails to launch. Even the brilliant Nat Faxon, as the reading-list-assigning new captain, rarely generates laughs, despite his exceptional ability at playing awkward. Chandrasekhar has been directing film and TV for three decades now — everything from indies to big-studio fare like The Dukes of Hazzard — but his point-and-shoot style works only when the writing and the acting do the work of delivering the laughs. Here, the Lizards all seem to be coasting, with occasional reminders of former glory; the “meow” bit gets a brief reprise, and the Canada bits played better in Super Troopers 2, itself an irrelevant sequel, but still better than this one.

Also, it might have helped for the screenplay to provide at least one scene in which intellectual Sarita explains her love for doofus Farva, but Broken Lizard movies have never been known for particularly deep female characters. Women in these movies are there to be one of the boys, to be sexpots, or to be villains. If they’re lucky, they get to be some combination of two of those ideas.

With the returning leads merely re-hitting their characters’ notes, it’s up to the newcomers to bring the zing. Jaffrey and Theba are perfectly cast as the elder Ramathorns, and these veterans immediately tap into the naughty nonsense that the rest of the film so rarely achieves. Crawford and Rudnitsky make amiable comic foils, and Dismukes demonstrates a presence that promises a big-screen career once his SNL tenure ends.

Say what you will about Jackass: Best and Last, no one can accuse those guys of phoning it in after 30 years. As for Super Troopers 3, well, one could.

Director: Jay Chandrasekhar
Screenwriters: Broken Lizard
Cast: Jay Chandrasekhar, Kevin Heffernan, Steve Lemme, Paul Soter, Erik Stolhanske, Hannah Simone, Nat Faxon, Chace Crawford, Andrew Dismukes, Marisa Coughlan, Brian Cox
Executive producers: Jay Chandrasekhar, Kevin Heffernan, Steve Lemme, Paul Soter, Erik Stolhanske, Michael Bowes, Peter E. Lengyel
Producer: Richard Perello
Director of photography: Joe Collins
Production design: Adam Scher
Editing: Spencer Houck
Music: Zach Robinson, Leo Birenberg
Sound design: Benjamin Cheah, supervising sound editor; Gregg Swiatlowski, additional re-recording mixer, supervising sound editor
Production companies: Searchlight Pictures, Broken Lizard, Cataland Films
In English
104 minutes