Super Troopers (2001)

Super Troopers arrives from 2001, a year when a comedy could subsist on syrup chugging, highway pranks, and the sight of grown men meowing at motorists. The Broken Lizard troupe built the thing from their own road-trip anecdotes, and the result is a shaggy, plot-driven lark about Vermont state troopers feuding with the local police over a marijuana smuggling case. Jay Chandrasekhar directs and plays Lieutenant Arcot Ramathorn, a lead role for an Indian-American performer in a mainstream studio comedy. The film makes nothing of this. Thorny is simply a veteran officer with a girlfriend and a talent for mischief, and the casting registers as a quiet fact of the ensemble instead of a statement.

Elsewhere the cupboard is bare. There are no LGBTQ characters or subtext. The women in the cast, Marisa Coughlan's underappreciated dispatcher and Lynda Carter's governor, serve the plot and little else; the comedy is proudly male, juvenile, and uninterested in correcting anyone. Farva's weight supplies a reliable punchline, which tells you where the film stands on bodily affirmation. Race goes unmentioned. The environment goes unmentioned. Class and capital go unmentioned. There is no neurodivergent arc, no historical revision, no sermon waiting at the end of the third act. The movie wants only to make you laugh at a man in a borrowed uniform handcuffed to a toilet.

By the standards of a later and more self-conscious decade, this is a film with almost nothing to declare. It is crude, episodic, and entirely content to be so. We can note the presence of a non-white lead without pretending the film labored to get him there. A mild curiosity, then. The troopers brawl, the case closes, and the credits roll over a reprise of the meow. Nothing is taught. Nothing is learned. The sommelier sets down the glass.