The Three Stooges

It’s taken a decade of rewrites and casting changes to bring the Farrelly brothers’ pet project to the screen. Big names like Jim Carrey and Benicio Del Toro came and went, leaving the door open for the unexpectedly perfect trio of relative unknowns: Chris Diamontopoulos, Sean Hayes and Will Sasso. They play Moe, Larry and Curly, the bumbling idiots who must venture into the big wide world to save the orphanage where they grew up. The result is neither big nor clever – an attempt to bring things up to date by roping in the cast of ‘Jersey Shore’ falls resoundingly flat – but it is fast and, at times, brilliantly funny. From casting Larry David as a nun (Sister Mary Mengele) through a series of defiantly dark foster-family jokes to a genius ‘Gone with the Wind’-inspired sight gag about farm-fed salmon, ‘The Three Stooges’ is exactly the film it wants to be. Was it worth ten years of anyone’s life? Probably not. Is it worth 88 minutes of yours? Absolutely.