- Title: Super Troopers 2
- IMDb: link
2001’s Super Troopers may not have broken the box office, but the comedy featuring the Broken Lizard comedy group had definite charm and has earned itself solid cult status over the years. Not nearly as much fun as the original, with a plot more convoluted than necessary, there are still laughs to be had for a film that struggles fighting off sequelitis.
17 years in the making (including relying on crowd funding to help raise money for the film), Super Troopers 2 brings back all the familiar faces of the former Vermont Highway Patrol. Having lost their jobs as state police since the last movie in an often-referenced tragedy involving Fred Savage (which sadly doesn’t offer nearly the payoff one would expect), the group is given a second chance when the Canadian border is redrawn around a single town and the U.S. needs a trained police force to step in.
Most of the sequel centers around our heroes struggling to get along with Canadians who didn’t ask to be Americanized and getting into juvenile pranks with the local Mounties (Tyler Labine, Will Sasso, and Hayes MacArthur) who they are replacing.
Emmanuelle Chriqui and Rob Lowe play two locals actually happy to meet the new police officers. Chriqui gets put into an only mildly-successful love subplot with Rabbit (Erik Stolhanske), while Lowe hams it up as the town’s mayor and local bordello owner. Like the original, there’s also a drug plot the troopers uncover and a montage of highway shenanigans. Farva (Kevin Heffernan) is still Farva, director Jay Chandrasekhar gives his character a subplot involving the overuse of feminine sex pills, and Paul Soter and Steve Lemme are on-hand… um, to support whatever shenanigans may occur (I guess).
Even with low expectations for a sequel after all this time, it’s hard not to be at least a little disappointed with the results of Super Troopers 2 which includes more groans mixed in this time around and a complicated twist ending that doesn’t really wrap-up the events of the film all that well. Despite Broken Lizard’s many years together, the comedy doesn’t have the same pace as it appears to take awhile for the characters to get into rhythm with each other leading to less big laughs the second time around. The result is mostly harmless sequel, with some genuinely funny moments, that some fans may enjoy.
