Super Troopers 2 (2018)

Seventeen years separate Super Troopers 2 from its predecessor, and the interval has done nothing to alter the troupe's comic metabolism. The crowdfunding campaign raised four point seven million dollars from people who wanted more of the same, and Broken Lizard delivered exactly that: pranks, mustaches, Canadian jokes, and a border survey treated by everyone involved as a mere pretext for shenanigans. The film exists because fans asked for it. That is its own kind of purity.

On the matter of contemporary cultural markers, the ledger is sparse. Jay Chandrasekhar's presence, and the mixed supporting cast around him, registers as ordinary ensemble casting, unaccompanied by any commentary on what it signifies. Women appear in positions of authority, including a governor and a police chief, yet the centerpiece brawl unfolds in a strip club and the film's instincts run toward the locker room. The villainy is smuggling and municipal graft, not capital. There is no environmental angle, no racial reckoning, no queer subtext, no neurodivergent character, no historical revision. Farva's body is the joke, and the film is untroubled by the implications. Nobody lectures anybody about anything.

What remains is a comedy of pure id, operating in a register that predates the current cultural thermostat. It is loud, crude, and entirely without a message. The film has no interest in improving its audience, and its audience has no interest in being improved. There is something almost restful in that arrangement, though restfulness is not the same as quality. The result plays like a reunion that nobody needed and nobody regrets, which is a category of entertainment we should perhaps acknowledge more honestly than we do. The meow jokes still land. That is the whole of the achievement, and the film knows it.

Thematic tags: sequel, box_office_number_one is not applicable, as the film opened fourth domestically. Tags: sequel.

{"thematic_tags": ["sequel"]}