Super Troopers 2 saunters on with C-list celebrity cameos

For fans of sequels like "Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights," "Staying Alive" and "Slap Shot 2: Breaking the Ice" or "Blues Brothers 2000" comes this belated sequel from the comedy troupe Broken Lizard, "Super Troopers 2."

The first flick, released in 2001, was a mildly diverting stoner comedy whose sum is less than its parts. In it, the troupe played a group of inept young cops on the Canadian border that served as an excuse to string together a number of skits into a flimsy narrative. Aside from a hysterical opening sequence involving a nervous passenger ingesting a bag of drugs to prevent the cops from finding them, the film missed more targets than it hit.

Now, almost two decades later, the guys return to the border over a land dispute with our northern neighbors, and we find all is still relatively the same. Erik Stolhanske's Rabbit is still somehow seen as "the rookie," Kevin Heffernan's Farva still makes fifth-grade potty and sex jokes in every situation, and Jay Chandrasekhar's Thorny seems to be the de facto leader who agrees to play along despite finding a peaceful existence post-policing,

One wonders how these guys are all still together so many years later, as their frequent contempt for one another should have led to parting ways long ago. But despite this narrative neglect, the film saunters on, filled with C-list celebrity cameos (look! It's Seann William "Stifler" Scott and Damon Wayans ... Jr.! And if you've been curious as to what Lynda Carter has been up to, wonder no more!), and a barrage of one-liners that are frequently unfunny and/or tone deaf. 

They have had a lot of time to workshop some stronger material into the project, but they tend to dip back into the same well as the original. If you like seeing people stuck in a toppled port-a-potty, men taking estrogen pills or mocking the way the French speak, you're in luck.

This is certainly a movie for fans, as it was crowdfunded and seemingly delivers exactly what the crowd wanted the most. But there is an air of "Dumb and Dumber To" that hangs over the sequel, as seeing middle-aged men pull off the same hijinx they had in their younger years doesn't have quite the same comedic resonance.

It's all fairly harmless (and brainless) stuff, but like celebrities hired to play at bar mitzvahs, they stick straight to the hits and provide little that's new.