The Three Stooges Movie Review
This film goes from zero to suxty in 0.00023 seconds.
It’s rare that movies start off sucking from the very first scene. Most films ease into suckage, like a proctologist giving you a Valium and telling you to try to relax before starting the colonoscopy. Either that or they have a few minutes of nice, soothing credits to take your mind off the pain to come. This movie, however, leaps right into the deep end of the suck pool from the very first few seconds with a huge rock tied around it’s feet.
It should be noted that I am in fact a huge Three Stooges fan, which probably contributed to the bile you are about to read regarding this bad idea of a movie. Many a childhood afternoon (and, for that matter, adult) was spent enjoying Larry, Moe, and Curly going through their Stooge antics (and, to a lesser extent, Shemp. Curly Joe we won’t discuss here). They were truly comedic geniuses, combining hilarious characters, brilliant dialog, ridiculous situations, and awesome physical humor into a layer cake that has never been duplicated (nor should anyone ever attempt to do so, a thought I wish had occurred to the Farrelly brothers a couple years ago. Three Stooges image courtesy of the Movie T Shirt category).
I would also like to add that I am for the most part a fan of the Farrelly brothers movies. Dumb and Dumber and There’s Something About Mary will always rank up as some of my favorite film. I am just going to have to call this one “that movie”. You know. “All the films by the Farrelly Brothers were great except for ‘that movie’.” This will likely be the film that ten years from now in interviews they will point to this film as the one that got away from them, or they were on serious drugs when they wrote the script (I don’t know if they do any drugs, but for the sake of my respect for their movie making skills I kind of hope so). I think my biggest disappointment in this film is that these guys opted to just do a bad remake rather than put the work in to make a good original film.
The problem is the Three Stooges aren’t really about Moe, Larry, and Curly as characters. They are about the comedic genius of Moses Horwitz, Louis Feinberg, and Jerome Horwitz who spent years honing their comedy and had a working chemistry that played brilliantly off each others strengths and weaknesses. You can’t recreate that by getting three guys who look vaguely like them and write a script. You can’t create that genius under direction. Half the time they were ad libbing anyway. They had 20 years of vaudeville experience before ever setting foot in front of a camera, and the thing about vaudeville was if you sucked you got booed off the stage. While the three guys did a decent imitation of Moe, Larry, and Curly they really didn’t have the timing, action, and pacing down well enough to be a tribute.
As I implied in my subtitle, the film starts off badly painfully with a bunch of orphans singing. I consider it a credit to my own humanity that I have never wanted to hit or injure a child in any way, but the opening few minutes really put that whole “never murder a child” resolution to the text. A duffel bag is thrown out of a moving car and the nun opens it up to reveal the three baby Stooges.
This is the first point at which it is driven home that we are not actually watching the Three Stooges (I can’t say the movie ran off the rails, as I don’t think it even knew where the train station was). You see, if this were an actual Three Stooges short or film and they needed baby Stooges the wouldn’t have cast three actual babies with bad hair. The Stooges would have dressed up as babies and continued with the schtick. This is even more driven home when they are shown a few minutes later as ten year old boys. Adult Stooges dressed up as kids with a giant lollypop is hilarious. 20 minutes of ten year olds doing a bad Stooges impersonation is excruciating. It’s like being dragged to the school play of the kid of a guy you see at work once in a while. This scene, which should have lasted 4 minutes (if it was even necessary) drags on as if one of the kid actors was the editors son.
Anyway, we finally get to the Stooges as adults (for the record they are Chris Diamantopoulos-Under New Management, Wedding Daze, Behind the Camera: the Unauthorized Behind the Scenes of Mork and Mindy(???); Sean Hayes-Will and Grace, the Bucket List, Parks and Rec; and Will Sasso-MadTV, Best in Show, Less Than Perfect). The live at the orphanage still doing odd jobs. We are treated to some decent if farcical Stooges-like antics, only to discover the orphanage is being closed if they can’t come up with $830,000. The boys decide to head out and find the money (Mission from God? Anyone else think this smacks heavily of the Blues Brothers? Again, I would have expected more from the Farrelly’s). They head off to the world they know nothing about (again, a failure to connect with the actual Stooges. The three were dumb, but not babes in the woods. In their own way the characters were canny and street wise). A super hot woman (Sofia Vergara-Modern Family, the Smurfs, Four Brothers) and her boyfriend want to kill her husband and promise the Stooges the money they need if they smother him in his sleep.
This is the final nail in the “We’re not in Kansas anymore” Stooges coffin. Sure the couple used some trickery to convince them this was the thing the victim really wanted, but in the real Stooges the three were in all ways decent guys. If they got into trouble with the law it was because they were “victims of circumstance” more than anything else. They always tried to do the right thing within the limits of their abilities (except for the ones where Moe played a spoof of Hitler) and were often motivated to help people.
The plot kicks off from there. The Stooges meet an old childhood chum (Kirby Heyborne-Saints and Soldiers, Pirates of the Great Salt Lake, The R.M.) and reconnect with him. The Stooges failed to kill their victim the first time and are off looking for him. At one point they dress as doctors and nurses and use babies as urine Super Soakers on each other (I have stated that rated R comedies now require baby excrement jokes. I guess PG means baby urine). I wish I was kidding. I can’t really see the Stooges condoning this, although at one point they did give a baby a loaded handgun. Then, just when you think you can’t hate the new Stooges anymore, the cast from the Jersey Shore crops up like a herpes sore. Again, I wish I were kidding. They are here, and not just for a few second cameo. Whatever connection this movie had to the original Stooges is more or less broken irrevocably and the movie is officially transformed into absolute drivel, although I have to admit I did enjoy seeing some of those failed abortions get slapped around by Moe.
As an aside, could the Farrelly brothers found a worse reality TV show to try to tie into? The show has really lost its popularity and even when it was hot it was truly polarizing (between the people who liked it and the people with two functioning brain hemispheres). Overall felt really dated. Kind of like the one reality show that answered the phone the day before shooting started.
The stars. I did catch myself laughing a few times. One scene in particular when the three guys were beating on each other on a stage, and some of the earlier scenes with one of the nuns from the orphanage. Also, there was some entertainment to be had watching Snookie get the double poke in the eyes. One star. Sofia Vegara seems to only play complete bitches in the movies I have seen, but I would probably let her stomp on my fingers for a chance at a date with her. One star. That’s it. Two stars.
The black holes. The whole Three Stooges remake concept in general. One black hole. A failure to really understand what makes the Stooges cool or connect properly with what they do. Two black holes. The film is laced with dopey kids who made me yearn for the quality acting and emoting of young Anakin Skywalker from the Phantom Menace. One black hole. Having three of those kids do a painful Three Stooges imitation for an extended period of time. One black hole. Making the Stooges out to be willing to kill someone. One black hole. Hiring actors not known for their physical comedy to do physical comedy. One black hole. Baby urine squirt guns. One black hole. The Jersey Shore. One black hole. A pat ending drawn from so far out of the the writers ass that it came with a free set of tonsils. One black hole. Total: ten black holes.
A grand total of eight black holes. I would love to tell you to not go see this but really, what’s the point? If you are the type to see it you will regardless of what I might say, and if you have any taste or discretion at all you will most likely have already discerned how much it blows and will avoid it anyway. Besides, it doesn’t matter if the movie bombs in America or not. Anything with this much physical comedy is going to kill in the foreign markets, making us slaves foreign cultures. I will say that while I was desperately searching my armrests for a fast forward button or hidden compartment with a handy cyanide pill in it a lot of the rest of the audience was laughing their (dumb) asses off. The fact that I saw it mid day on a Sunday for $5 might be a contributing factor to the audience’s intellect level, but perhaps I really don’t have a grasp on what people like these days. So if you are entertained by idiotic remakes of things that don’t need to be remade by all means go see it. Date movie? Hell no. Women hate the Three Stooges even when it is good. They don’t have the gene to see the quality of that performance (that’s OK. Men lack the gene that would allow us to find Sex in the City entertaining) and odds are she will hate you for subjecting her to it.
Thanks for reading. I saw Lockout this evening and will review it tomorrow morning. Follow me on Twitter @NerdKungFu or send me an email at [email protected] if you have specific questions or suggestions. Feel free to leave comments here if you have something specific to say on this review. Talk to you soon.
Dave
