The Three Stooges (2012)

The Three Stooges arrives in 2012 as a Farrelly brothers exercise in resurrecting Moe, Larry, and Curly for a new century. It is packaged as three episodes: an orphanage in peril, a botched murder scheme, and a detour through Jersey Shore. The film has one ambition, which is to deliver eye pokes, nyuks, and property damage at a steady rate. There is no social instruction, no moral appendix, and no attempt to make the audience better people. We can respect the honesty of that position.

We scanned the proceedings for contemporary cultural markers. The cast includes women and minority performers, but they function as nuns, a femme fatale, and a singer, with no commentary attached. There is no LGBTQ content, no feminist critique, no racial consciousness, no climate concern, and no anti-capitalist sermon, despite a corrupt rich villain and a reality television scheme. The villain is a farce, not a system. There is no body positivity messaging, and the Stooges are idiots by tradition, not by diagnosis. No revisionist history appears, and the film never pauses for a lecture. It simply refuses to stop for a sermon, which is its saving grace.

The result is a cultural artifact from a vanishing mode: comedy that asks nothing of the audience except tolerance for repeated head bonks. It is not hostile to progressive values. It has no interest in them. In 2012, this might have seemed retrograde or merely silly. Now it plays like a relic from before every studio comedy carried a moral appendix. We score it accordingly. A clean slate. No lessons. No agenda. Just three grown men behaving badly for our amusement. The sommelier would note a vintage of pure slapstick, with no aftertaste of sermon. Drink immediately.