Movie Review - ‘The Three Stooges’

By Bob Garver

“The Three Stooges” is the stu­pid­est movie of the year. The film is prob­a­bly proud to be awarded that title, which annoys me. Of course it’s a stu­pid movie, it’s the Stooges. It would frankly be baf­fling if it were any­thing but stu­pid. The prob­lem isn’t that it’s stu­pid, the prob­lem is that it isn’t funny. Let’s say that funny is pop­corn and stu­pid is golden fla­vored pop­corn top­ping. The top­ping can make the pop­corn bet­ter, but you wouldn’t want to just drink it by itself. “The Three Stooges” is like being forced to gulp down a cup of golden fla­vored pop­corn topping.

The Three Stooges were a com­edy trio best known for a line of short films in the 30s and 40s. The lineup changed through­out the years, but the most pop­u­lar incar­na­tion con­sisted of the bald Curly, bald­ing Larry, and salad bowl-cut Moe. The com­edy was mostly phys­i­cal, usu­ally involv­ing the Stooges get­ting hurt either by acci­dent or by each other. There wasn’t a lot of vari­ety to the gags, which is why the films were usu­ally only twenty min­utes. That should be your first clue that this 90-minute movie isn’t going to work.

The Stooges have now been rein­vented with Will Sasso as Curly, Sean Hayes as Larry, and Chris Dia­man­topou­los as Moe. They’re put into a plot where they need to raise money to save their child­hood orphan­age. It’s one of those orphan­ages run by nuns, one of whom is played by Larry David, whose cast­ing was surely fun­nier on paper than it is onscreen. The team’s Stoogery leads them into a mur­der plot involv­ing an old orphan­age buddy and his wife (Sofia Ver­gara). To recap: the film wastes the humor poten­tial of three Stooges, an orphan­age full of nuns, and Sofia Vergara.

The Stooges’ style hasn’t aged well. The film is made for peo­ple who think that scenes of var­i­ous kinds of hit­ting never get old. Those scenes were old the first time I saw the trailer. We also have to suf­fer through some painful jokes about the Stooges fail­ing to under­stand mod­ern tech­nol­ogy, a dread­ful trend often found in updates of out­dated source mate­r­ial. The absolute worst thing about the movie is a scat­o­log­i­cal scene in a nurs­ery. It is potty humor badly in need of a potty. I can­not think off­hand of a scene I have detested more in all of movie history.

Here’s an exam­ple of how stu­pid (with­out being funny) the movie is. Moe gets cast on the bottom-of-the-barrel real­ity show “Jer­sey Shore”. He pulls his abu­sive schtick on the cast mem­bers, who by the way do a ter­ri­ble job of play­ing them­selves. We’re sup­posed to laugh watch­ing the spoiled celebri­ties get humil­i­ated. Except that any­one who’s ever seen so much as a clip of “Jer­sey Shore” knows that these idiots do a fine job of humil­i­at­ing them­selves. I find it depress­ing that these shame­less peo­ple got paid to appear in this movie, even if they are in it just to get smacked. It would have saved a lot of trou­ble to just say in pass­ing that the Stooges are too dumb for “Jer­sey Shore”. Or maybe it would be fun­nier to say that they’re too intelligent.

Even the basic gags in “The Three Stooges” aren’t funny. They have more in com­mon with bone-crunching come­dies like “Home Alone” than the actual, milder Stooges shorts. The look and speech pat­terns of the Stooges were always dis­tinc­tive, but here brought into the mod­ern world (in color) are noth­ing short of dis­tract­ing. Last but not least, the film could have done with­out the wacky sound effects when­ever some­one gets hurt. I know it’s a Stooges trade­mark, but in the shorts it felt some­what nat­ural, here it feels like there’s a sound effects guy just off cam­era hov­er­ing his fin­ger over the “bonk” but­ton. “The Three Stooges” is unfunny in so many ways at once.

One Star out of Five

“The Three Stooges” is rated PG for slap­stick action vio­lence and some rude and sug­ges­tive humor includ­ing lan­guage. Its run­ning time is 92 minutes.

Con­tact Bob Garver at rrg251@nyu.edu.

Posted by Bob Garver on Apr 16 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.