The War Against the ‘Nades

I feel for the comedic team of Broken Lizard. The comedy troupe, originally based in New York, came to prominence with their first big film (and only second movie ever), Super Troopers. That film did solid enough Box Office at the time, making $23.2 Mil on a $3 Mil budget, but it was the home release for the film that really took off. Once the audience on home video found the movie, Super Troopers brought in nearly $30 Mil more, doubling its profits and cementing the team and making them seem like a bankable group.

But success proved elusive for the team. Follow-up films Club Dread, Beerfest, and The Slammin' Salmon weren’t nearly as well received as Super Troopers, and all of them proved to be financial failures. Beerfest did the best of all their follow-ups, but with an inflated budget of $17.5 Mil, its $20.4 Mil still left it as a flop upon release. Their films did better on home video, and it seemed like they would be shoved back to store shelves if their films continued to be met with lackluster Box Office response.

It’s understandable, then, why the troupe would go back to the well. With three previous films failing to rise up to their biggest success (or, really, get even close), the only thing they’d have left is to try and make a sequel to Super Troopers. Studios weren’t initially interested, but after a round of crowdfunding brought in over $4 Mil (on a basic goal of $2 Mil), Broken Lizard were able to get Cataland Films and Fox Searchlight Pictures onboard. On a budget of $13.5 Mil the team created Super Troopers 2, and released it into theaters where the film made… an okay amount of money. $32 Mil, in total, which was their biggest return in theaters so far. But it did illustrate that the comedy troupe only has so much of an audience, making any budget over, say, $10 Mil feel dubious even under the best of circumstances.

Or maybe it was just that Super Troopers 2 didn’t have the same magic as the original film and audiences didn’t show up. Created in 2001, Super Troopers feels like the Broken Lizard team throwing every funny idea they could at the wall just to see what stuck. It had a very loose plot that was really just secondary to the guys doing weird bits and acting out skits for their audience. The film worked because it was dude hanging out, being goofy, and making every joke they could. That film emptied the barrel of everything they found funny, and future films struggled to pack in as much humor because there just wasn’t as much left to mine.

Super Troopers 2 has the same problem: it revisits a well that we’ve already seen get completely emptied, and now it has to try and scrape any humor it can out of what’s left. That’s not to say that Super Troopers 2 is a bad film. It’s a generally genial film with a bunch of charismatic guys having fun being silly. There’s still some funny bits here, a few really solid sequences that got me to laugh out loud, but there’s no denying that Super Troopers 2 feels like a watered down version of the first film, desperate to find the same relevance that Broken Lizard’s first effort managed.

In the years since their adventures on the Highway Patrol, our team of former cops – Jay Chandrasekhar as Senior Trooper Arcot "Thorny" Ramathorn, Paul Soter as Trooper Carl Foster, Steve Lemme as Trooper MacIntyre "Mac" Womack, Erik Stolhanske as Trooper Robbie "Rabbit" Roto, and Kevin Heffernan as Trooper Rodney "Rod" Farva – have had to take up side gigs just to make ends meet. This is partly because they’re a bunch of slackers that probably shouldn’t have been cops, and at least partly because they accidentally got Fred Savage (as himself) killed while doing a ride-along. But all that changes when they get a call from their former Chief, John O'Hagen (Brian Cox), who informs them that they might just be able to get their jobs back.

It seems that due to a territorial dispute with Canada, a small chunk of land encompassing a small border town would soon become part of the United States. Our former boys-in-green are called back in to take over patrol duties from the local team of mounties – Tyler Labine as Sergeant Christophe Bellefuille, Will Sasso as Sergeant Major Roger Archambault, and Hayes MacArthur as Staff Sergeant Major Henri Podien – in this quiet hamlet. But a surprise discovery of a stash of drugs and guns in an abandoned cabin leads the troopers on a new case that might just turn everything in this quiet little town upside down.

I won’t deny, I felt a little disappointment that the film felt the need to effectively reset the team of troopers back to where they were in the previous film. That movie had them as Highway Patrolmen in a part of upper Vermont, but ended with them becoming the Sudsbury police. Here, though, the film goes out of its way to make them highwaymen again, as if there was no way for the guys to be able to tell their stories if they weren’t on the open highway. It’s silly, really, forcing them to be state troopers just to have the “troopers” in the movie’s title, when there was nothing stopping the movie from playing with them as local cops instead.

Because of the reset, the film functionally gets to replay many of the previous movie’s jokes, sometimes retreading material that didn’t need to be retread. For instance, we didn’t need more jokes about Rabbit being the rookie on the team (especially since it’s ten years on and he’s no longer a rookie). We also didn’t need a reappearance of the “meow” guy, with the film redoing parts of that skit even. It was funny once; it’s much less funny twice. Every time the sequel went back to the well, redoing jokes we’d seen before, I wished the movie could have found better, newer material to play with.

Thankfully, at times it does. There’s good fun to be had putting the Vermonties up against the Mounties. The team makes a lot of Canadian jokes, but also then lets the Canadians get in some solid material about stupid, fat, and lazy Americans. These sequences pop with material, jokes flying right and left, and these were highlights. It may not be the most original material, playing Americans and Canadians against each other, but it was at least amusing enough to carry several scenes in the film.

It doesn’t shake the vibe, though, that Super Troopers 2 was made because the team at Broken Lizard didn’t have any better ideas to pursue. The guys are very funny, and they still clearly have the comedic charm as they all settle back into their old roles and get to work playing around, joking, and having fun. That sense of fun still permeates this film… I just wish it could have been for a story that was more interesting, and with a batch of jokes that were better, fresher, and easier to laugh at.

Super Troopers 2 isn’t a bad movie, but it isn’t the redemption movie the team needed either. It’s just amusing enough to be worth watching once, but it can’t hold a candle to the original film. That is a late night comedy classic. Super Troopers 2, quite literally, plays second in comparison.