There goes an hour and forty minutes I'll never get back.
Do you like Canada jokes? Think Canadian accents are funny and want to hear someone try to make fun of them every two minutes? Interested in a movie that plays into every Canadian and American stereotype that you can possibly think of? Well, then, maybe Super Troopers 2 is the movie for you.
For everyone else though, not so much.
The first Super Troopers came out in 2001, not making a ton of money during the time of its initial release but then going on to become something of a cult-hit amongst all the stoners out there. I watched Super Troopers for the first time a couple days ago and I can say that the movie actually holds up pretty well — I laughed far more than I expected to as director and star Jay Chandrasekhar really knows how to have fun with this premise.
Seventeen years later and Chandrasekhar has apparently lost that skill, as Super Troopers 2 is a painfully unfunny experience.
If you remember how the first Super Troopers ended, the squad of highway patrol officers — Mac (Steve Lemme), Rabbit (Erik Stolhanske), Thorny (Chandrasekhar ), Foster (Paul Soter) and Farva (Kevin Heffernan) — all got hired on to a local police force after losing their first jobs.
Apparently, in the time that we’ve last seen them, they’ve lost that job too. There was some freak incident with a famous celebrity who everyone in this movie has heard of yet I seem to have no clue who he is that resulted in them getting kicked off that force too.
Never fear though, because they’re finally getting a third shot at redemption here — even though these guys are kind of terrible people and there’s no clear reason why we should be rooting for them, but I digress.
This time, they’re being sent to Canada. Well, for the time being, it’s Canada. Some American mayor found some sort of loophole in an old map or something (that’s about as well as the movie actually tries to explain it) that says a city currently belonging to a Canadian Providence is actually US soil.
The troopers, then, are being sent in to see that the whole transition process of switching this city to become American territory goes well.
That means they have to work with local Canadian law enforcement — Mountie Podien (Hayes MacArthur), Bellefuille (Tyler Labine) and Archambault (Will Sasso) — and Mayor Guy LeFranc (Rob Lowe), none of whom are exactly extending them a warm welcome.
Of course, the guys don’t really care all that much because they’re never really cared about their jobs in the first place (and they wonder why they keep getting fired). They’re just here to smoke a bunch of weed and cause mayhem.
Oh yeah, and then there’s a forced plot about a drug-smuggling business and budget cuts that winds up playing out the exact same way that it did in the first movie. They had seventeen years to come up with new ideas for Super Troopers 2 and they wind up basically remaking the first one? How is that even possible?
Actually, it’s a pretty common trope in comedy sequels as almost none of them are able to recapture that lightning in the bottle the first one made. We’ve seen it happen in Bad Santa 2, Caddyshack 2, Anchorman 2, Zoolander 2, etc. And now you can throw Super Troopers 2 up on that list.
The worst part of it all is how unfunny this movie is. The first Super Troopers actually had some clever bits thrown in there. Super Troopers 2 relies on nothing more than bathroom humor and stereotypes, all of which come off in a mean-spirited kind of way. People’s racial identities and sexuality are often made fun of, as the whole movie just feels like something that wasn’t well thought out at all.
The best embodiment of this, perhaps, is the character of Farva. If you thought Farva was annoying in the first Super Troopers, as I did, prepare to go insane. Chandrasekhar apparently thinks this character is hilarious, as he finds a way to incorporate him in every single scene (not much of an exaggeration, I would guess that he’s in 90 percent of this movie). Every time he’s on there, he comes off as so obscenely unfunny and it takes away from the whole experience.
To be fair, there was one scene that did make me laugh, which involved the three Canadian cops and a conversation about Danny DeVito. Still, one laugh in an hour and forty minute long “comedy” movie isn’t exactly something you want to be advertising.
Gone is the likable chemistry between all the leads and the fun care-free type of feeling that the first Super Troopers had. Super Troopers 2 is nothing more than a bunch of forced improv for the first two acts, despite the actors having no actual script to work on which forces them to fall short, and then a bunch of crammed plot in the third act.
There’s also a couple of ridiculous moments — and one, in particular, comes to mind here — where it doesn’t even look like they have the right production budget for this movie. There’s a scene at the very beginning of Super Troopers 2 where a bus goes flying off a cliff. The shot is so clearly a matchbox car instead of a real bus or green-screen that it’s actually jarring. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a movie that wasn’t a SyFy original or at least 50 years old with a moment that’s so obviously a model or toy, but this moment in Super Troopers 2 sticks out like a sore thumb.
You probably didn’t need me to tell you this, but go ahead and pass on Super Troopers 2. I have a hard time imagining that even the die-hard fans of the original are going to find something to root for in this over-stuffed sequel.
Watch the trailer for Super Troopers 2 here and then let us know, in the comments below, did you see this movie? Did you dislike it as much as I did? What do you think of the first Super Troopers?