The Three Stooges

All three of the leads get very close to the Stooges' old looks and personalities, but they do more than impersonate; they inhabit.

Bobby and Peter Farrelly's The Three Stooges is not particularly great, though it is possibly brilliant, a picture that goes beyond homage to become its own rambunctious invention - it's one big eye-poke, with footnotes.

There is an appealing nyuk, nyuk nostalgic spirit to The Three Stooges. To fully appreciate this paean to slapstick and silly nonsense simply requires that cynicism be temporarily shelved and the thinking side of the brain shut down.

The combination of childlike glee and grown-up precision is a wonder. The movie actually earns the right to exist, which is no mean feat.

The Stooges were always better in short doses. And 90 minutes of PG nyuk-nyuk-nyuk can seem like an eternity.

The movie is content to simply mimic the old Stooges, bringing nothing new to the table.

It's just not enough to say that The Three Stooges is the death of comedy. Rather, it's the death, burial, putrefaction and decomposition of comedy. It is where comedy, once alive, ends up as dust blowing in the wind, like something out of a really bad Kansas song.

I was laughing so hard during this movie. You know, I looked at the top yellow comment, and thought, well... I like stupid humor. I was not disappointed, at all. It took slapstick, and threw it way up in the air, and loogied all over a baby with this movie. It was fantastic!

Honestly not a bad attempt but the Jersey shore moments really ruins it shame really.

You can't make a movie like this without the real Three Stooges doing their thing. This is what happens when you try to do it. It's averagely okay, but not laughable compared to the early days of the Three Stooges.

Sometimes the slapstick and sight gags are enjoyable, but as a whole it is just so unbelievably irritating and completely unnecessary. A bad tribute. Ugh.

About the best thing I can say about this is that Sean Hayes, Will Sasso and Chris Diamantopoulos are spot-on in their portrayals of the witless title trio. They nail the mannerisms and vocalizations of the three so completely, it's actually a bit spooky; ghost watching on the same level as Jim Carrey's Andy Kaufman in Man on the Moon. Alas, those performances are wasted on a tale that's gratingly predictable, horribly misdirected and woefully, thoroughly unfunny. For some unfathomable reason, the troupe is dropped untouched into the present, where their slapstick Vaudeville act feels over-amped and out of place. I get that nobody on the planet was clamoring for a reinvention of this particular wheel, but when the script's so desperate for validation it shoehorns in the cast of Jersey Shore for more than just a cameo, maybe it's time to take a step back and reassess. The end result is a total disaster, not just missing the boat but careening off the pier and plummeting to the bottom of the ocean. If this is the best revival modern Hollywood can come up with for three legends, they should take a long, hard look at their motives before they go about plundering any more graves.