Theme Week - Broken Lizard; Super Troopers

This week, I figure I would do a bit of a theme week. And for that theme, I have decided to review the films of one of my favourite comedy teams (I don’t really know how else to classify them, as they only really make films together – no stage shows or the like). Well, anyway, over a period of 10 years and five films (technically they’ve been making films for 17 years now, but I hadn’t seen their very first film until recently), I’ve been nothing but entertained by Jay Chandrasekhar, Kevin Heffernan, Paul Soter, Steve Lemme and Erik Stolhanske – collectively known as Broken Lizard.

Anyway, I’ll be doing these films in the order in which I have seen them, which mean that I will be starting off with their most well loved film, the second film they made (and first with an actual budget) – Super Troopers.

The Spurbury, Vermont, State Troopers department is facing budget cuts and a possible closure, due in part to the fact that their squadron are prank obsessed idiots. In addition to their continuing in fighting and pranking each other, they also have to contend with the Spurbury Police Department (their sworn enemies and other possible closure) and an influx of drugs and murder. Eventually, they find out that it’s up to them to break the mystery and hopefully save their station.

As far as Broken Lizard movies go, this is probably the perfect introduction to them (as it was to myself and many others) as it showcases not only the lad’s style of humour, but each man gets their moment to shine, thus giving you full introduction to the fact that they don’t all subscribe to “one guy does one style”. Sure, you will get to see this in action in the other films, especially as it pertains to Kevin and Jay, but there are glimmers in this film. In addition to the boys themselves, in each film they manage to pull in some bigger name actors who all get the joke and play along willingly – and Super Troopers is no different, with the always brilliant Brian Cox as the State Trooper commander, Daniel Von Bargen as the Police Chief and Lynda Carter as the town mayor.

Like I said, this is probably the perfect introduction to the Broken Lizard style, so if you haven’t checked it out, definitely give it a looking.