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Super Troopers

What’s the Story?

Reviewed by Nell Minow

SUPER TROOPERS feels like the kind of movie five college buddies who didn't want to go to law school would dream up after a weeklong marathon of smoking dope and watching John Landis movies. In fact, that's pretty much how it came about. Five recent Colgate graduates who created a comedy group called Broken Lizard wrote and star in it and one of them directed it. The result is a sort of Animal House crossed with Cheech and Chong with a touch of the 70's Erik Estrada television show CHiPs. It is a slob comedy story of the rivalry between a group of Vermont highway patrolmen and the local police. It escalates from taunts and practical jokes to a struggle over turf and then to a struggle for survival. The members of Broken Lizard play the troopers, whose idea of "cheeky" hijinks includes making bets about how many times one of them can use the word "meow" while giving a motorist a speeding ticket or donning a hippie wig and racing the other troupers to the Canadian border. In classic college fashion, drugs, alcohol, humiliation, and sex provide most of the subjects for humor.

Is It Any Good?

2

This is in the middle range for bad taste comedies, in both the bad taste and comedy categories. There are a lot of gross jokes that are cheerfully politically incorrect but not as offensive as some of what is out there. They are not as stupid as some of what we've seen in recent movies, but they are not terrifically funny either. It falls somewhere between American Pie and Tom Green.

No one in Broken Lizard has what anyone might deem star quality -- in those uniforms, they look more like they are auditioning for a local franchise for the Village People than like anyone who might know how to hold a radar gun on a speeding 18-wheeler. But director Jay Chandrasekhar and one or two of the others clearly have fun on screen and it occasionally reaches the audience.

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