This week, I had the unfortunate experience of watching Super Troopers 2 (2018). This was a sequel that no one asked for, and frankly was made about 16-17 years too late after the first one (2001). I was 11 when the first one came out, and the last, and only, time I watched it I was probably 13 or 14 years old. So it had been some time since I had seen, or cared about this “franchise” at all. I do remember that the style of humor in this film is highly reminiscent of the first’s style, and while that worked in 2001, it definitely does not work in 2018. Even moreso, it does not hold up in 2026, given the current political state of the world, and especially the United States. There were numerous jokes about “LETS GO TO WAR WITH CANADA” which were even unfunny back then, but with today’s climate, I found myself groaning at them every time. 

I will start this review off with the good: One singular, and albeit, stupid joke that I actually laughed at. The only time I laughed throughout the entire duration of the film. The premise is that the US government realized the country borderline for Vermont and Quebec was drawn wrong, and that some of Quebec’s territory actually belongs to the US. So how does the government handle this? They select the single worst troop of cops and send them there to refurbish an old abandoned mountie outpost and form democratic relations with the local politicians. As they arrive at the rundown outpost, they see a tire on the roof. One of the characters says “How do you even get a tire on the roof?” to which another one replies “What? You’ve never played ‘throw the tire on the roof’ before?” Queue the only laugh this entire film earned from me. 

Now for the actual review, and much like I was in for a doozy watching this, you’re in for one reading this. For a film made in 2018, they had an entire bit about how “boomers can’t text” and “technology scary” a tried, and untrue level of humor that was just the tip of the iceberg to the horrible and unfunny jokes in this one. It has the style of humor where they throw 900 jokes a minute at you, hoping that one or two stick, and somehow, none do. I was constantly annoyed at every attempt at humor. They also did the “pull a prank on a coworker joke” and it was extremely unfunny the first time, so what do they do? They do the same joke a second time about 14 seconds later. Again, it did not land or garner a laugh from me or my partner. After all this, another painful 30-45 seconds later in the movie, guess what? They do the SAME JOKE a third time to the same character. I’m sure you can guess that the third time did not earn a laugh or even a chuckle from either of us. 

The French-Canadians were all played by B/C list actors, one of whom I have only seen act in the worst, and least funny attempts at comedy over the years. Just by casting him in your movie, you know the movie will be a groanfest and the complete opposite of funny. Not only were the accents horrendous, culturally insensitive, but the jokes themselves were barely ‘jokes’ by any definition of the word I can come up with. 

An hour and twelve minutes into this ordeal (out of a 1hr40min runtime) I got up and paused the movie to see how much of this torture was left. I found myself pondering “How does a movie like this get pitched, written, cast, produced, made, released, and then end up in my living room on my TV eight years later?” At this point in the movie, I have not a clue what the overall plot is. It appears to just be a series of bad jokes, random happenings, and zero cohesion. Up to this point in the movie, the only thing of significance to the plot that has occurred is they found a stash of drugs. As you can imagine, the scene that followed finding the drugs involves the American cops then each taking one of each of the pills. Queue an absolutely unfunny drug trip sequence, again where nothing of relevance to any sort of story this movie wanted to have happens. Also, I’m pretty sure this already happened in the first film, plagiarizing yourself much? 

Finally at about one hour and thirty-three minutes into the movie, the plot happens. Turns out, the mayor of the small town they’re in was the drug kingpin. A shoot out occurs, and they miraculously save the day. The entire plot of this movie is boiled down to the last 4 minute scene, and not in a smart or good way, but in a ‘hey we need something to happen that makes this feel like a story’ kind of way. 

As the film comes to an end, of course the American cops and the French-Canadian mounties break out into a fist fight, despite having just caught the bad guy (if you can even call him that) and working together for once. In this scene, the fake French accents by the B movie actors are even worse than they were previously, and I am left again wondering how and why a movie like this was allowed to be made in 2018.

0 mallards/5

-Seann

Rampage (2018) is a film based upon the somewhat popular video game of the same name, originally released all the way back in 1986. I remember renting the game from the video store and playing it late into the evening with a friend of mine. It was an awesome, rollicking good time – exploding buildings, fighting giant monsters, eating containers of green slime. Everything a kid could hope for. Imagine if you removed all of the fun or exciting elements of the original game, slapped on a half-baked storyline, wrote some stock dialogue, and had the biggest (physically and metaphorically) leading actor that Hollywood had to offer as the star of the film. Enter Rampage (2018) and Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson.

Reviewing this movie is kind of challenging, because there’s really not that much substance to speak of. It’s a pretty typical Hollywood flick these days – take a beloved thing from the past, shove The Rock into it, spend $100million on CGI, and release it to worldwide acclaim. I’m looking forward to the end of this particular era of filmmaking, though I think the trend might outlive me. This movie, and the others like it referenced above, are made purely to be consumed by the general public. While there’s nothing wrong with that, and everyone deserves entertainment (especially in the current political and economic situation), it doesn’t lend itself well to critique

Instead of critiquing this movie as a piece of art (it’s unsurprisingly bad), I’ll instead critique it as whether it accomplishes its goals. The goals of a movie like this are to, chiefly, get people to spend $12 on tickets to see it and, with any luck, $8 on a large popcorn and soda for the kids. Secondly, hold someone’s attention for as close to 90 minutes as you can get away with. Thirdly, be just memorable enough for people to see it on a streaming service and say “oh, I wonder if this was any good” while they’re looking for something to do on a weeknight. Let’s go through these one-by-one and assess the movie’s successes or failures of each objective goal.

Did this movie make money? By golly, it sure did. The budget was between $120million and $140million, and it raked in a little over $420million at the box office. That’s a triple return on investment, which is nothing to sneeze at. That being said, this movie employs a cheat code (pun intended) by starring perennial movie tough-guy leading man Dwayne Johnson. It’s impossible for Dwayne Johnson movies to fail. His film before this, San Andreas (2015) made about $475million on a budget of $110million. Before that, Journey 2: The Mysterious Island (2013) made $330million on a budget of $80million. Even The Rock’s silliest film, Tooth Fairy (2010), in which he plays a menacing tooth fairy, more than doubled its budget. The people love Dwayne Johnson. But I don’t.

Did this movie hold my attention for close to 90 minutes? Let’s state some facts: the listed runtime of this movie is 107 minutes. The ending credits roll for about 8 minutes of that runtime (while a bizarre hip-hop mashup of Smashing Pumpkins plays), and the first scene doesn’t really begin until about 3 minutes into the start of the movie. Subtract 11 minutes from the runtime, and we’re looking at a legitimate movie length of 96 minutes. I can think of a scene or two that could be cut out to slim that down some (contact me for business opportunities), but throwing the consumer an extra 6 minutes every now and then is just a bonus that we can attribute to the studios’ generosity towards the movie-going public. 

There are very few scenes in this movie that do not contain some sort of action or action-adjacent activities. This is a boon for the movie overall, and it’s what we most want to see in a movie of this type. The few non-action scenes we get are largely focused around the good guys discussing how they’re going to stop the bad guys, or the bad guys laying out their evil plan so the audience is aware of the stakes. Now, whether their evil plan makes any sense or not is up for debate (it doesn’t), and whether the good guys are actually doing any good to help prevent the plan of the bad guys (they aren’t) is questionable, the audience doesn’t really care about that. We know The Rock and The Monkey are going to win in the end. We just want to see some big creatures fighting, some building being destroyed, and some big explosions before it’s all said and done, and this movie delivers that. This is another point in the “success” column for this movie, and – wait a second, why do I suddenly feel like eating overpriced food and playing mediocre arcade games?

Does this movie look appealing while scrolling through the streaming services? Sure, just the same as any other. It’s not any better or worse than any other of the movies of this kind – Transformers, Jumanji, etc. This is just a pretty stock movie. It has the advantage of being based on a video game, so perhaps that can cause some nostalgic feelings, but this type of movie doesn’t pop up under the “cinematic masterpieces” section, and for good reason. This is the epitome of a brainrot movie, in the nicest way possible. I’ve not used the term film to describe this a single time, because that would be doing it a disservice. A film is an attempt at making art that is expressive  – Rampage (2018) as an attempt at making a ton of money and being entertaining.

In the end, it does accomplish its goals, even though the goals are a misguided way to go about the medium of cinema. I found it to be really truly unremarkable in every way. Bland, forgettable, predictable, minimal plot, maximum action and explosions. Monkey see, monkey do, or rather, monkey get Dwayne Johnson to do. Rampage (2018) has a score of 6.1/10 on IMDB, a 51% tomatometer rating on Rotten Tomatoes, and a 2.4 out of 5 on Letterboxd. I waffled on this one between a 2 and a 2.5, but I think I convinced myself that this movie was just barely competent enough to achieve its aims. Making a bunch of money doesn’t hurt.

2.5 mallards/5

-Maxwell