Super Troopers Review

Broken Lizard made this for almost nothing and it looks it, a flat television grade picture shot mostly in daylight on one stretch of Vermont highway. The story is a nothing: a state trooper unit facing closure stumbles into a drug case while feuding with the local police. What the film actually is, and what anyone remembers, is a series of games the troopers play to amuse themselves on shift. The opening stop, where a car of terrified stoners is slowly dismantled by an officer who never breaks character, is close to a perfect comic scene, and the rule about repeating a word ten times has entered the language for a whole generation of viewers.

The trouble is that between the bits there is a real plot the film keeps having to service, and almost every minute spent on the conspiracy is dead air. The performances are uneven by design, since these are writers first and actors second. It should not work as often as it does, and it works because the group has the confidence to let a joke sit far past the point another film would cut away.