Film review: ‘The Three Stooges’

Yeah, the look and sound like Larry, Moe and Curly, but seriously, if you love The Three Stooges so much, watch their shorts — not this movie.

By Josh Bell

Wednesday, April 11, 2012 | 5:19 p.m.

Veteran comedy filmmakers Peter and Bobby Farrelly (Dumb & Dumber, There’s Something About Mary) have been talking about making a movie based on The Three Stooges for more than a decade, but as long-in-the-works dream projects go, it’s pretty anticlimactic. Chris Diamantopoulos, Sean Hayes and Will Sasso play Moe, Larry and Curly, the three moronic friends whose favorite activities include poking each other in the eyes and hitting each other on the head, which they do many, many times over the course of the 90-minute movie. The Farrellys try to mimic the structure of the original Stooges adventures by dividing the movie up into three “episodes,” but it’s really a single drawn-out story about the Stooges trying to save the orphanage where they grew up. Diamantopoulos, Hayes and Sasso deliver impressions rather than performances, and the movie itself is just a repetitive, unsuccessful impression that neither honors the Stooges’ legacy nor provides any justification for bringing them into the present day.