The Three Stooges

It sounded like a bad idea from the beginning. Now there’s a movie trailer to prove it.

Bobby and Peter Farrelly (There’s Something About Mary, Dumb and Dumber) have directedThe Three Stooges, a serious drama that puts Larry, Curly and Moe in modern day, armed with the same antics that made them so famous in the first place.

It’s a recipe for disaster.

First, the good news: Sean Hayes (Larry),Will Sasso (Curly) and Chris Diamantopoulos (Moe) look the parts. They act the parts. They play the parts. While I haven’t seen much of the original Stooges (a little before my time), the Farrelly brothers seem to have captured the goofiness of the three characters.

Now, the bad news.

Their style of comedy is 70 years out of date. That’s not a slight against the original Three Stooges movies; of what I’ve seen, they’re pretty funny, at least in small doses. They’re funny, in the context of the film industry and senses of humor in the 1930′s.

But just because they were funny then doesn’t mean they’re funny now. The humor just doesn’t translate for modern audiences. Do you want to pay money to see three men bonking and poking each other in the heads and eyes? For an hour and a half?

Didn’t think so.

The movie trailer for The Three Stooges confirms this. It’s utterly unfunny, and the fact that the Farrelly’s unsurprisingly set the film in modern day doesn’t help. Reinventing old franchises and placing the characters in modern day has been a common approach for studios, but the failures outweigh the successes. Had the Farrelly’s kept the movie in the 1930′s and perhaps played with the formula a bit by making a faux biopic about the three men – with the twist being that they’re just as goofy in real life as they are on film - a reincarnation of The Three Stooges may have worked. Unlikely, but possible.

But that’s not the movie audiences will be subjected to when it’s released on April 13, 2012. While admittedly the lobster-in-the-pants gag evoked some chuckles, and it was pleasing to see Snooki get jabbed in the eyes, The Three Stooges movie trailer fails miserably