Super Troopers occupies a sacred corner of the millennial DVD shelf, a goofy rebuttal to the endless procession of just-the-facts-ma’am TV cops that reimagined America’s most mythologized authority figures as incompetent brats.
The original is a testament to Y2K friendship – the college comedy troupe Broken Lizard, after losing out on an MTV show to The State, pooled their money to make a scrappy indie that became a cult classic. It had Brian Cox gleefully playing against his capital-A Actor persona (a novelty for American audiences in 2001) and offering a glimpse of the Logan Roy fury he would later perfect on Succession, only with lines such as “I’ll believe ya when me shit turns purple and smells like rainbow sherbet.” After generating more than $60m in post-release sales on a reported $3m budget, a film franchise was born.
Super Troopers 3 is exactly as good as you would expect the third installment of a time-capsule comedy to be, a dick joke driven into the ground. The racial and ethnic jabs that were once smartly framed to turn the offended into the offender now feel forced and utterly snapless. As fun as it is to see the old band back together, they don’t leave you with the same satisfaction when they run through their greatest hits: the car chases, the group hijinks, the playful digs at Canada – which land differently now that the US has started treating its northern neighbor as a potential addition to the union.
Everyone looks older, heavier and weary behind their gold-wire frame sunglasses and bristly mustaches, as if they’re just punching the clock on their gravy train. That’s despite Kevin Heffernan bearing the brunt of the film’s physical comedy workload as Farva, the obnoxious trooper you would least want pulling a prank on you by the side of the road.
After playing the foil in the first film and a change of pace in the second, Farva gets his closeup, perhaps to the chagrin of Jay Chandrasekhar – the film’s director and Broken Lizard frontman, who also plays Farva’s longtime rival, the Indian-American trooper Thorny. The tension is kicked up another notch when Thorny’s sister (New Girl’s Hannah Simone) is mysteriously run off the road, and Farva rescues her just before her Mini explodes – a brave act that sparks instant love, an engagement and much debate over the precise term for Florence Nightingale syndrome. As the Indian wedding arc unfolds in the A-story – the parents’ meeting, the costume fittings, the bachelor party – the troopers are also sort of working another drug-smuggling case, one seemingly destined to end with them cracking it just in time to get booted off the force again.
The Spy v Spy games between Farva and Thorny are meant to be the heart of the film, the running joke that makes Super Troopers 3 feel more like a live-action cartoon. But just as modern versions of Bugs Bunny can look slapdash and misshapen next to the postwar classics, this third installment can’t hold a candle to the original, a masterclass in juvenile comedy. What’s more, there’s a reason cartoons are animated: drawings aren’t expected to grow, learn or reckon with the passage of time the way flesh-and-blood characters are. They don’t have to reckon with real-world power. A coyote chasing a roadrunner through the desert doesn’t age nearly as poorly as a bunch of troopers still chasing the same old gags for 25 years because a cartoon coyote can’t pull someone over, escalate an encounter and change the course of a person’s life.
Of course, Super Troopers could have taken the route many franchises do by their third installment and passed the baton to a new generation. (SNL’s Andrew Dismukes was right there and a notable bright spot as the crooked rookie cop.) But even that would not have been enough to overcome the central problem with Super Troopers 3: the idea of cops as an uncomplicated source of screwball comedy doesn’t stand up at a time when policing itself has become the subject of intense public scrutiny, particularly over racial disparities and immigration enforcement.
The pop culture image of police as sterling heroes isn’t as untouchable as it once was. They’re often the bad guys now, and their incompetence doesn’t make them lovable screwups – it makes them exceedingly dangerous, a threat to the very communities they are meant to protect and serve. The fact that Super Troopers 3 willfully ignores this is what truly dates the franchise.
Chandrasekhar and the Broken Lizard crew may have thought a third Super Troopers would make for a fun trip down memory lane. But if anything, it’s an object lesson that their cop jokes may have done as much to venerate America’s most mythologized authority figures as subvert them.
Super Troopers 3 is out in Australian cinemas on 6 August and in the US and UK on 7 August
