So, Super Troopers 3, the third film in 25 years about cops who like to dick about, by Broken Lizard, a comedy troupe who met at college in 1989 and have stuck together ever since, dicking about.
First things first, it’s funny. Not coherently funny, not relentlessly funny and not ever knowingly intellectually funny. In fact it’s regularly funny in ways you’ll possibly not be proud of later. But I sat in a darkened preview screening and chortled away repeatedly. Actually surprising myself. Since it’s number three and the distributor was selling it hard (pizza and drinks!), I was primed for a barrel-scraping and, yes, there was a bit of that going on. But there were a thousand little gags that are probably worth watching the film for again, and a central performance by Kevin Heffernan that really sells the whole thing.
Plot: Heffernan’s character, Farva, wants to marry the sister of fellow cop Thorny (Jay Chandrasekhar), who is determined to save his sister Sarita (Hannah Simone) from this fate. But Sarita is keen to have her man – the “short and wide” condoms Farva prefers may have something to do with it. And her parents (Iqbal Theba, Sakina Jaffrey), who are all in on a big Indian wedding, don’t seem to find Farva’s oafishness, crassness, racism, sexism, and so on, that much of a deal-breaker.
Meanwhile, who is bringing a dangerous new drug over the border from Canada and are local bad boys the Buchanans (Chace Crawford, Jon Rudnitsky) somehow involved? And will the plot about the wedding and the drugs operation somehow crescendo together in the film’s finale? You know they will.
The Broken Lizard boys – Chandrasekhar and Heffernan, along with Steve Lemme, Paul Soter and Erik Stolhanske, who play fellow cops, are now knocking on the door of 60. They are wearing well but their comedy aiming at everything and everything now also makes gags at their own expense. So jokes about EVs and apps (crap, obviously, because new), and a nostalgic reference to AskJeeves, alongside burping, snakes and epi-pens. At one point one of the cops inserts an arm into an elephant’s rectum. Jokes about Canadians abound, what with Vermont – where this is set – being nowhere near it. And Indians, since Farva is about to marry one. But most successfully, jokes about attempts by Captain Markowski (Nat Faxon, who’s collaborated with Broken Lizard several times) to approach ethnic difference in a culturally sensitive way, cringe.
Brian Cox turns up. His appearance in the first film helped get it financed. He’s playing O’Hagen for the third time, though the old police captain is now retired and at a loose end. See Cox as totemic because he’s not doing an awful lot, though there is something post-credits suggesting O’Hagen is not completely out to grass.
I had a look at reviews for the first two films – juvenile, silly, crude, amiable and goofy was the consensus, with some complaints about padding. Yes and yes. Chandrasekhar’s direction is functional, which is all it needs to be, but occasionally the life just drops out of this film, which in the main comes across as Police Academy spliced with The Dukes of Hazzard, original version and remake variety (which Chandrasekhar directed).
Dumb fun you’d thumbnail it, though there’s a lot of little verbal jokes twinkling away in the wings, often dropping from the mouths of Lemme, Soter and Stolhanske, who function as an idiot Greek chorus, commenting on the antics of, mainly, Heffernan’s Farva, idiot-in-chief.
Amazingly, it sets things up for a ST4, with the suggestion even of a title – was it O’Hagen’s Gold or The Search for O’Hagen’s Gold, or something like that? Oh, go on then.
Super Troopers 3 – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2026
