Seventeen years later, they are back! They took their time and I’m pretty sure that if they waited a bit longer a streaming service would have offered them to produce this Super Troopers sequel. Anyway, the Broken Lizard team (Jay Chandrasekhar, Kevin Heffernan, Steve Lemme, Paul Soter, and Erik Stolhanske) went back to their first and probably biggest success with Super Troopers 2, in 2018. Already six years ago.
It’s a bit like Bill & Ted’s return, after all these years of fans asking for it, you hope it would not suck. Yes, the comparison is not the best as the cultural impact of the two is quite different, but still, with movies that look of their time, you may expect that almost two decades later a sequel may fall a bit flat. The thing is, here, it doesn’t feel that long ago for some reason.
When an international border dispute arises between the U.S. and Canada, the Super Troopers—Mac, Thorny, Foster, Rabbit and Farva—are called in to set up a new Highway Patrol station in the disputed area.
Super Troopers 2 opens with a dream sequence that is quickly escalating into something crazy. Then, reality hits us with Rabbit being faced with the always obnoxious Farva except they are not cops anymore. None of them are because of the “Fred Savage incident” (wait the end credits to learn all about it).
It doesn’t take long though for Captain O’Hagen (Brian Cox) to call his boys back for a fishing trip in Canada. There, the old friends got an offer they can’t refuse to become once again State Troopers in Vermont as it was discovered that the border with Canada may have to move a little.
Is it silly? Completely, as pretty much everything in this movie. Exactly what you can expect from a sequel to Super Troopers. They needed to get everybody back in uniforms and, instead of trying to be logical about it, they just followed the silly road, and they clearly decided not to leave it at any moment.
I think it was a smart idea. They tried to challenge expectations though, playing with the main story bits of the first movie to move the plot forward. It doesn’t work for everything, but for the most part, it didn’t feel like a rush job. The script was well thought to give to the fans who supported the project enough for their buck while trying to keep things fresh to give Super Troopers 2 some real value.
I think that, in that spirit, it works pretty well. It was not going to revolutionize comedy, but it’s not a letdown. All the Canadian jokes worked for me (speaking French probably helped to appreciate some of them), Brian Cox is still the MVP, and the Troopers kept their chemistry intact.
I was a bit disappointed by Thorny doing only one recurring joke, and Foster being slightly sidelined—Rabbit mostly getting his place as he is the one with the romantic interest (played by Emmanuelle Chriqui). Farva was strangely more tolerable while still being the worst, which is quite fun to watch, and Mac didn’t change one iota.
Overall, there’s not a lot to say about Super Troopers 2. I think it is a decent little comedy while being a good sequel. The humor is the same, and I quite like that. In fact, it may be the biggest feat of this movie as, with time, a lot of the humor from the early 2000s didn’t age well. The Broken Lizard guys kept things funny, in my opinion, by just being themselves. They know their audience.
I must also say before finishing writing this review that there’s one big improvement, it’s Jay Chandrasekhar’s direction. Way more confident after all these years, he composed more interesting shots, never got self-indulgent with fan service bits, and kept everything quite dynamic from beginning to end.
I hesitated to cover Super Troopers 2 now as I’m planning on writing about two other Broken Lizard movies I really liked, Club Dread and Beerfest, but doing it in order would not change a lot, I think.
THE ON MY SHELF COLUMN LOOKS BACK AT ALL THE MOVIES IN MY BLU-RAY COLLECTION.
