Here we have the latest entry in a long-dormant franchise that I had no prior knowledge of. It’s not terribly often that I feel compelled to see such a movie, and even less frequent when I feel compelled to go back and watch the previous entries. But Super Troopers 3 caught my attention.
Super Troopers had the good fortune to come out in 2001, only a few short months before 9/11 and the Dubya years upended the relationship between America’s citizens and government. The film came out a couple of years before “Reno 911!”, precluding eight goddamn seasons and a movie with a similar premise. I might add that this was a decade after Rodney King and a decade before Anthony Lamar Smith, so there was a lull in headlines that allowed for the possibility that corrupt police officers could be played for laughs.
(Side note: “Brooklyn Nine-Nine”, the other most famous police comedy show in modern pop culture, ran for eight seasons from 2013-2021.)
The basic premise is simple: The comedy troupe of Broken Lizard plays a cadre of state highway patrolmen whose jurisdiction is limited to 50 miles of highway in rural Vermont. So they’re sad little kings of a sad little road, with nobody to hold them to any kind of accountability because nothing they do matters. Thus they play elaborate and juvenile pranks on each other and on passing motorists because there’s no other way to vent their frustrations, alleviate their boredom, satisfy their egos, maintain their macho delusions, exercise their legal authority, or justify their wages.
It’s National Lampoon’s Animal House, but with cops. Here’s the problem: In that other movie, Delta Tau Chi were a bunch of drunken college boys with no power and no ambition, too young and stupid and ignorant to be anything more than a nuisance. By contrast, these Vermont State Troopers are full-grown adults with badges and guns. And jobs with union protection against any kind of meaningful consequence for their dumbfuckery.
Something else about Animal House is that the Deltas were on “double secret probation”, ignorant and unaware of what was really on the line until the third act. In both of the previous entries, the troopers are repeatedly told that their jobs are on the line and they’d better start acting as if they want to save their careers. Yet they keep on deliberately playing pranks, fucking with each other and the public in plain view.
The filmmakers want us to care about whether or not they keep their jobs, even as they want us to laugh while the characters are willfully sabotaging themselves. It’s a self-defeating double-standard, not unlike how the troopers’ pranks are heavily dependent on abusing their status and authority to intimidate the unwitting taxpayers while also framing the antics as harmless fun. I can’t speak to how that played when the movies first came out, but that flat-out does not work after so many case studies over so many years to prove that police are anything but harmless.
All of this to say that the first movie hasn’t aged well at all. Luckily, Super Troopers 2 was a step forward. That movie came out in 2018, when the MAGA movement was in its prime and fascist jingoistic xenophobia reached a peak like America hadn’t seen since… well, since the first movie, come to think of it. The sequel ingeniously leveraged its premise into a culture clash, allowing for Canadians and Americans to take the piss out of each other before ultimately finding common ground. Thus the characters’ innate stupidity and willful disregard for authority was effectively parlayed into political… well, it wasn’t smart enough to be called “satire”, so let’s call it “parody” instead.
And now here we are in 2026, when nostalgia for the ’00s is in ascendance and we’ve got Super Troopers 3. I was hopeful for another step forward, launching off the improvements in the sequel. Unfortunately, what we got were several steps backward and directly off a cliff.
(Side note: Given how all five starring members of Broken Lizard are also co-writers and exec producers, forgive me if I don’t credit them as such like I typically do.)
Director Jay Chandrasekhar plays Lt. Arcot “Thorny” Ramathorn, and the film opens with the introduction of his sister (Sarita, played by Hannah Simone). Long story short, there’s a car accident and one of Thorny’s colleagues saved her life. They immediately fall in love and they’re set to be married only two months later. Here’s the kicker: Sarita’s new fiance is none other than Rod Farva (Kevin Heffernan), easily the most sexist and racist trooper on the team. Thorny disapproves of the marriage and we’re off to the races.
Where do I even begin?
For the uninitiated, Farva is notoriously the most obnoxious loudmouth in the starring cast. This is the guy so willfully ignorant, so rude and bullheaded and insensitive that literally nobody else can stand him. Even among the other troopers, every last one of them knows better than to trust this asshole. In fact, the other troopers seem to put special effort into torturing him, because they all know he can take it and he deserves it.
What makes Farva funny is that he’s fun to hate. Literally anyone with functional senses and an ounce of taste could tell on sight that this guy will only take two seconds to ruin your entire day. Yet somehow, this ugly boorish xenophobic alcoholic womanizing shitpile somehow charmed his way into marrying a beautiful genius bioscientist in only two months. And he then proceeds to charm her parents (played by Sakina Jaffrey and Iqbal Theba), winning over the whole family and outmaneuvering Thorny at every turn.
A charming Farva simply does not work. It’s not funny, because it flies directly in the face of everything that made Farva funny to begin with. I might add that Thorny has his family’s best interests at heart and we know Farva doesn’t. We know enough about Farva to know that Thorny is 100 percent in the right, especially if you’ve seen the first two movies. Hell, I can’t possibly stress enough that the whole point of Farva is that the dumbest motherfuckers on the planet (his coworkers, namely) could tell on sight that this is the last man you would want marrying and/or procreating with literally anyone, yet Thorny’s own relatives can’t see that and we’re supposed to take them seriously.
As a direct result, watching Farva slowly but surely turn Thorny’s own family against him out of spite and horniness isn’t funny or endearing, it’s just plain mean-spirited. There did eventually come a point when I lost all interest and sympathy. If Sarita and her parents want to make the biggest mistake of their entire goddamn lives and see her married to a jackass she’s known for all of two months — over the loud and repeated objections of the immediate family member who’s known this same jackass for all of two decades — to hell with the lot of them. Learn the hard way if you insist on it, I don’t care anymore.
Which brings me to the second main problem with this movie: There’s no straight foil.
The first movie had Ursula Hanson (Marisa Coughlan), but she’s barely in the second or third movies and the female romantic lead this time around barely deserves mention. The first two movies had Captain John O’Hagan (Brian Cox), but he’s retired now and the third movie reduces him to a joke character who keeps finding new excuses to hang around the station even though he doesn’t have a job there anymore. And the new captain (Todd Markowski, played by Nat Faxon) is another joke character, such a sensitive New Age dolt that he circles back around to being casually racist, which in turn means that he can’t keep the other characters in check.
It’s a foundational pillar of this franchise that our main characters are witless juvenile dolts who can’t be reliably trusted with an empty milk carton, much less a badge and a gun. That premise becomes significantly less funny and less intelligent without a straight foil to call these characters out on their shit. Without that voice of reason, all we’re left with are a bunch of shrill and spiteful idiots harming innocent people and each other. It gets old and obnoxious with a speed that makes the 100-minute runtime feel interminable.
I might further add that police brutality was steadily becoming a hot topic between the first and second films (Oscar Grant III was shot in 2009, Alton Sterling was killed in 2016), and it’s only grown more prominent since George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, et al. We’ve seen far too many people of color killed by white cops in recent memory, and the filmmakers can’t/won’t do anything to address that. Instead, we get a white man specifically engineered to be the worst cop imaginable, lying and sleazing his way into marrying a BIPOC family of a culture he knows or cares nothing about. Thanks, but no thanks.
Instead, we get so many plotlines about how the leading cast are getting older, and jealous of the younger generation that threatens to replace them. Mac (Steve Lemme) gets a story arc involving a new electric patrol vehicle. Carl and Rabbit (respectively played by Paul Soter and Erik Stolhanske) are both feeling threatened by the arrival of a new and surprisingly competent rookie (Coy, played by Andrew Dismukes). I’ve already mentioned the retired captain who keeps sticking around despite the new captain.
The problem here is that inevitably, the old guard try to prove that they can get by perfectly fine without any unwelcome interference from the new help. In turn, this inevitably results in the old guard screwing up. In theory, this is supposed to be funny. In practice, the filmmakers are debunking their own point and proving why the old guard has to go. And sure, the old guard does eventually catch the overarching bad guys (Don’t even get me started…), but it speaks volumes that the leading characters can only win through transparent plot contrivances and outright cheating.
The filmmakers were likely hoping we’d be laughing too hard to notice. Sorry, but no such luck.
Super Troopers 3 is a disgrace. It’s outright embarrassing how the main actors tried to prove that they’re still relevant after 25 years of advancing age, and they only proved their own obsolescence in the process. This concept has aged terribly, their style of humor has only grown more obnoxious and spiteful, and Broken Lizard is either unable or unwilling to change with the times.
As it is, we no longer need what they’re selling. And looking at the respective IMDb pages of Messrs. Chandrasekhar, Stolhanske, Lemme, Soter, and Heffernan, I don’t see much evidence that Broken Lizard has anything worthwhile left to offer in the worlds of film or TV. I sincerely hope I’m wrong about that. But until such time as they come up with something new that we can actually use, they’d better close the book on this series and keep themselves chained to the drawing board.