A goofy sense of inconsequentiality is an underappreciated trait in comedies. There’s an abiding charm to movies so low in their stakes and so loose in their order that they feel as if at any moment they might fall apart. Films like “Caddyshack” and “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” are good examples, but outside of the loose absurdities of some of Will Ferrell and Adam McKay’s films (“Step Brothers,” “Anchorman”) most of today’s big-screen comedies are more conceptually tidy.
The comedy collective Broken Lizard, though, are pupils of the “Caddyshack” school. They are in it mainly to amuse themselves, and smoke a lot of weed in the process. It’s a laudable mission.
Fittingly timed to open in theaters on 4/20 is “Super Troopers 2,” Broken Lizard’s sequel to their minor cult hit, the 2001 original that introduced the troupe, formed in the ’90s at Colgate University, of Jay Chandrasekhar, Kevin Heffernan, Steve Lemme, Paul Soter and Erik Stolhanske. They went on to make a handful of other films and their director, Chandrasekhar, has helmed episodes of notable TV sitcoms (“Arrested Development,” ”Community”), but “Super Troopers” remains their best-known (and easily their best) film, one propelled largely by its popularity on home video.
“Super Troopers” deserved the love that came its way. It’s about a station of prank-loving, drug-taking Vermont highway patrolmen (all played by the Broken Lizard gang) who couldn’t take their jobs less seriously despite the efforts of their exasperated but lovable chief, played by the excellent Brian Cox — an 800-pound gorilla of an actor in a pleasantly featherweight comedy.
It was the movie’s fans that — through a surprisingly successful crowd-funding effort — pushed “Super Troopers 2” into existence, 17 years later. Such gaps have been death to comedies (“Zoolander 2” comes to mind) but nothing so dramatic befalls this still low-budget, still low-stakes sequel.
