Mark Reviews Movies: SUPER TROOPERS 2

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Review by Mark Dujsik | April 19, 2018

Continuing a trend of belated sequels, Super Troopers 2 provides a somewhat more structured movie than its 16-year-old predecessor. That approach doesn't seem to accommodate the style of the comedy troupe Broken Lizard, who made a fairly funny comedy with the individual comic sketches within Super Troopers but let the plot take over just a bit too much. Here, we get a few more amusing scenes involving the shenanigans—or, as is apparently, according to the movie itself, preferred in Canada, chicanery—of the gang of misfit highway patrol officers. We also get a familiar plot about an illegal drug-trafficking ring that inevitably gets in the way of the troupe's jokes.

After a rocky start involving an intentionally unrelated and surreal dream sequence (a painfully unfunny, extended bit involving the gang as a rock band, trying to elude some cops), the guys of Broken Lizard, led by the movie's director Jay Chandrasekhar, do find a good excuse for making a sequel over a decade and a half later. The former officers of the law, having disgraced themselves as highway officers in the first movie and local cops in the years between, fall right back into the job with little questioning and no paperwork. In a way, the concept—devoid of any sense of reality or consequences—is pretty funny.

There's a border dispute between the United States and Canada involving the crew's home state of Vermont. What seemed to be Canadian land actually belongs to the U.S. For inexplicable reasons, the guys, who caused so much trouble and had an "incident" involving a former well-known child actor, are recruited to enforce the laws on the highways of this soon-to-be extension of Vermont.

The whole crew returns. Robert "Rabbit" Roto (Erik Stolhanske) is no longer a rookie, but his fellow officers still treat him like one. Arcot "Thorny" Ramathorn (Chandrasekhar) has abandoned his newfound career as a bearded lumberjack to rejoin the mustachioed officer-of-the-law gig. MacIntyre "Mac" Womack (Steve Lemme) is also present. In trying to determine how to describe his character in even a short sentence, it becomes clear that these guys are pretty much interchangeable pawns for whatever gags are happening. The same conclusion also could be reached by way of Carl Foster (Paul Soter), whose primary identifiable trait appears to be that he doesn't have a nickname.

For those who remember the first movie, the exception to the interchangeable quality of these characters comes with Rodney Farva (Kevin Heffernan), the big, dumb oaf who takes great pleasure in tormenting his pals and, perhaps, even greater pleasure in coming up with terrible puns. This movie sees him repeatedly shocked by a microphone rigged with crossed wires, chased by a bear, and inflicting some self-mutilation after losing a bet. Farva is a jerk, so he brings it upon himself, really. He's dumb, so he makes himself an easy target. With the long pause in between the first movie and this one, it becomes immediately apparent that, if Farva is the standout of our cast of protagonists, the original's successes had little to do with the characters themselves.

Aside from a few pranks against Farva and a handful of pranks against unsuspecting motorists, most of the humor of the comedy team's screenplay comes in the form of some good-natured cultural mockery. The target, naturally, is Canadian culture, which sees a nationalist protest against the changing border resolved by some citizens hurling hockey pucks at the highway patrolmen. There's a trio of Mounties (played by Tyler Labine, Will Sasso, and Hayes MacArthur), each one with a different ridiculous accent, who don't take too kindly to having their jobs lost to some Americans.

The mayor (played by Rob Lowe) of a town within the disputed territory is a former hockey player and current bordello owner who's as polite as he is comfortable with tugging on a dangling part of the anatomy of one of his employees. Meanwhile, the local cultural attaché (played by Emmanuelle Chriqui) tries to help the guys win over the town. Brian Cox returns as the team's frustrated captain to add some gravitas to the silliness.

One has to embrace the randomness of these gags, and it's helpful that the Broken Lizard team certainly embraces that quality. The gags arrive with little rhyme or reason, but they're based within some vaguely overarching themes—Farva getting his comeuppance, the metric system, the conflict between the U.S. cops and their Canadian counterparts, Farva being a jerk, silly dialects, Farva being injured for being a jerk. They're varied jokes, too, and in the one obvious instance that the movie repeats a gag from the original, it at least has the good sense to acknowledge that fact.

It doesn't become repetitive, but there's a definite sense that Broken Lizard has run this well dry before the finale. Combine that with the useless plot, and Super Troopers 2 ends up like a wearing-thing variation of its predecessor: It's funny and anarchic—just not funny or anarchic enough.

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