In the world of comedy, the Three Stooges are a sacred cow. Look
upon them with reverence and respect. Whatever you do, don’t remake them.
Someone forgot to tell that to Peter and Bobby Farrelly, the two
dunces who have spent something like 17 years trying to bring this white-hot heap
of disaster to the big screen. And what do we get for all that waiting? Baby
urine!
Really? I mean really?!?!
It was bad enough when one baby was peeing in Curly’s eyes and open mouth, but
then three babies. And then a whole nursery of babies being aimed and squeezed
for the amusement of the Stooges. At one point, so much urine is being shot
around that Curly is nearly gargling on the stuff. Movies like this can’t be
good for beverage sales at the snack bar.
Where this picture fails its audience is not with the baby pee —
though that sequence certainly does help — but at the head-on collision the
Farrellys orchestrate between the classic Stooges and a modern-day incarnation
of the Stooges. The resulting mess is neither funny nor nostalgic. It is quite
simply a failure of epic proportions.
The Three Stooges tries
very hard to be a classic Three Stooges feature. You’ll hear the familiar
music, you’ll see all the gags, and you’ll hear all of Curly’s nyuk-nyuks. But the spirit and soul is
missing.
Frankly, it’s just not funny. I didn’t laugh for the first 20
minutes. The joke: Curly, forgetting that the head of a sledgehammer is in a
bucket of water, douses a nun in the face. The sledgehammer bashes against her brow
with a metallic clang, to which Curly says, “See, I told you there is too much
iron in the water.” It wasn’t even a hearty laugh.
The movie starts at the beginning with Larry, Curly and Moe abandoned
at an orphanage. Thirty-five years later and they’re still there doing the
whole dog-and-pony show to prospective parents. They also torture the nuns, who
might be willing to suggest contraceptives to the mother who bore these three
imbeciles. “They are full of heart and dim of wit,” one nun says. Due to the
Stooges’ excessive insurance liability, the orphanage is under threat of foreclosure,
so the trio hit the road to raise some cash and save their home full of orphan clichés.
Most of the film is a series of slapstick routines that loosely
follow a subplot involving a gold-digging wife, her rich husband and her
desperate lover. And then the cast of The
Jersey Shore shows up to shit directly into the proverbial fan. There’s a joke
about the Kardashians — “Three idiots, where? The Kardashians are here?” — and I
was half expecting them to turn up because, what the hell, Snooki’s here so why
not.
Even novice fans of the Stooges will recognize all the trademark
gags: eye pokes, hammering noses, nostril pulls, three-face slap, the belly punch
and all of Curly’s exaggerated facial slaps. The physicality of the Stooge
humor is commendable, and the actors inhabit the original jokes well enough. But
it all just feels so wrong. A scene with a choking dolphin. A bit with a girl
being lifted into the air by a dozen balloons. A nun in an outfit made with
less material than one of Rick Santorum’s handkerchiefs. A prop gag with a
salmon farm falls especially flat.
My real issue, though is with the pee sequence. The inclusion of
the scene proves that the Farrelly Brothers have no respect for the material. And
how do these guys get out of bed in the morning without laughing at the site of
their own dicks? “It’s a penis! Haha! Let’s watch it urinate. Haha!” I can
handle scenes involving semen in hair, pubic hair glued on faces, bad comb overs,
freakishly tan and wrinkled old ladies, Amish men pooping into urinals,
laxatives in coffee and all other kinds of immature boy humor, but not here
with this film.
Could this movie, under different circumstances, ever be good?
Maybe. The Artist aped from early
silent classics and still managed to be a modern-day version of those genres. Surely
the Stooges could get a similar treatment that would be equally new and
nostalgic at the same time.
This version is not it. And in terms of bad ideas, this one is a
milestone, right there with Steve Martin’s performance as Inspector Clouseau,
another sacred cow that should have never been reinvented.
I will say this, though, Stooges got one thing right: Shemp doesn’t
show up once.
