Just saw it over the weekend with my kids, and we all loved it. Very, very good tribute to the old Stooges shorts, by actors who certainly appeared to be fans, and respected the originals. Larry David was brilliant too.
The only sour note for me:
The “Don’t try this at home kids!” PSA with the fake Farrelly brothers at the end of the movie. What was the point of that? Do they really think kids are going to smack each other with hammers when they get home? Even my 7 year old said “That was dumb. I could tell they were fake hammers!”
Didn’t notice it. I suspect they filmed it with some height balancing tricks with a lot of the gags.
How did you manage that? It only came out on the 13th.
Saw it last night and have to give kudos to the actors who played the Stooges. Phenomenal, Oscar-worthy impersonations. Also loved a few of the set-pieces that updated classic Stooges bits, such as the fish farm and the scenes in the hospital (“get the paddles!”) and there were several points where I laughed more than I have at a movie for quite some time.
Unfortunately, pretty much everything else in the film left me cold. The whole thing seemed remarkably poorly directed, lit and filmed, and seemed, well, a bit lazy. Maybe, for example, not showing any signs of aging by the orphanage staff over 25 years was a deliberate choice intended to echo the slapdash production values of the original shorts, but here it just came off as inept.
Anyway, didn’t hate it, but felt they could have done considerably better by the concept.
I saw it with my boyfriend and his 8 year old son. BF wasn’t really familiar with the stooges, not having grown up in the US and the boyo had no idea. What fun we had! I had seen many stooge flix as a kid and never particularly got into it but the three leads abosulutely nailed it and Larry David had me laughing out loud.It was just good clean goofy fun that any kid could enjoy.Not sure why Jennifer Hudson was in it, though. Thankfully her part was small. How does she keep ending up in movies?
This is the only film I wanted to see on this vacation. I left after 25 minutes. The pacing dragged, the beginning, with the young stooges went on too long.
I have never seen the original Stooges. It seems to be an exclusively American success, and didn’t get much distribution internationally. It certainly wasn’t anywhere on TV as I grew up, while Abbot and Costello, the Marx Brothers, and things like the Road To movies with Bing Crosby and Bob Hope.
So I am not expecting this movie to have too much international box office success.
I agree they spent way too much time on them as kids. Once the adult Stooges showed up, though, is when the laughs started. Maybe they’d already lost you, but there’s a good chance you’d have forgiven the slow start if you’d stuck it out. I did.
The bit on the steeple, repairing the bell, had us howling with laughter. I haven’t laughed so much in a lonnng time. We loved it, totally. We thought the actors really nailed the Stooges, although the film crams in more shtick than the Stooges would have done in half a dozen shorts.
And we, too, were totally puzzled by the tack-on that showed [spoiler]the hammers were just rubber, etc. Seemed totally unnecessary, but I suspect that the producers’ law firm figured that anytime some kid poked another kid in the eye, the parents would sue the studio for promoting violence. Just like everytime anyone throws a bucket of water on someone, they sue Frank Baum’s estate. [spoiler]
I saw it last night. I loved it! My impression was that the production values and simplistic plotting were intentionally copied from the originals.
The ridiculous hole-riddled criminal plan (oh look, three idiots, let’s involve them in our capital crime, it’s foolproof!) is exactly the type of thing they did in the shorts. I think this is part of what made it work so well.
It’s broad farce. Knowing the originals, it’s what I would want in a tribute. Anything else just wouldn’t work, IMHO.
You could have Curly making Curly sounds and Moe hitting and poking everyone and Larry being the victim and losing hair but with a serious carefully crafted plot and it would probably fall flat.
The stooges as babies and then children worked for me. Seeing those kids doing the impressions made me laugh for some reason.
I think a lot of the laughs were laughs of appreciation of the often spot-on impersonations and recognition of the gags and plots.
I thought the corny “Dewey, Cheatum, and Howe” business names worked also, both because of recogniton but also because some of them were genuinely funny.
…you haven’t refuted his point: unless you can show me how often the Three Stooges are shown on air in New Zealand or Australia in the last thirty-fourty years.
[spoiler]