For the record, it's English. I was born in Tilbury, Essex, made temporarily 
American citizen?"
The popularity of the 3 Stooges is impressive. The team, in one form or another, appeared in 220 films. They were originally a vaudeville act where slapstick, not punch lines, ruled. In those days, vaudeville stages were never amplified, so comedians had to resort to high-speed farce and slapstick in order to be noticed; dialog was at a minimum. It was very much a visual medium for the simple fact that those at the back of the theater couldn’t hear the acts if all the performers did was talk. By comparison, today’s comedians are practically comatose compared to their vaudeville counterparts. You could say that the microphone literally changed comedy.
The Stooges took their style of mugging and slapstick from the stage and turned it into comic gold on the big screen in a long series of shorts right into the sixties. A colleague, who loves the Stooges, said that when fans watch the Stooges today it’s for the feeling of nostalgia more than the comedy; reliving a memory of what used to make them laugh. I’m not sure if that’s true. Perhaps, but I still tend to laugh when I see them dressed as firefighters in their five second cameo in It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, and all they’re doing is standing there in a line.
Film directors Peter and Bobby Farrelly are big fans, which should come as no surprise considering how much slapstick they have themselves used in previous films. Given the task of making a brand new film of the Stooges, the end result is clearly a labor of love. After almost ten years of trying to get the project off the ground, including several casting changes, The Three Stooges is finally on film.
First, despite some early reports, The Three Stooges is not a bio-pic or even an updated remake of previous work, this is a stand alone, bona-fide, brand new 3 Stooges film. The Farelly’s have done a great job of keeping the style and spirit of the originals intact, complete with funny faces on the credits and the inclusion of the Pop Goes The Weasel and the Three Blind Mice music themes. The film is constructed out of three individual acts as if we’re watching three of the Stooges’ shorts, each with its own credit introduction and self-contained chaos, though all three acts go to make one complete arc of a story.
The casting is good. Chris Diamantopoulos as Moe and Will Sasso as Curly get everything right, from the looks, the mugging and, of course, the slapstick, but the standout is Sean Hayes who is practically unrecognizable as Larry. He not only looks and captures the overall essence of what Larry is all about, but he also gets the voice and the line delivery so pitch-perfect it’s as if the Farrelly’s dubbed in the voice of the original Larry Fine and had Hayes mime the dialog.
But despite all this, does it work? No, not really. You can admire how thorough the Farrelly’s have been with making a new Stooges film while retaining – to the letter – the style of the original work, but that’s doesn’t make it good. The slapstick is painful to watch, and despite how well the three leads recreate the Stooges persona, their time and style has passed. Perhaps if the studio had had the notion to release the film in black and white with a fifties setting, given the film a certain nostalgic visual flair with the occasional crackle on the print to make the film appear intentionally aged, then maybe watching these guys slap each other for ninety minutes might have worked better, but in a modern-day setting, in color with a crystal clear digital projection, it’s just not that funny.
