Like the Police Academy films only a thousand times funnier, Super Troopers marks a superior debut for the stage-trained Broken Lizard comedy troupe. Judging by its premise, genre, and lack of star power, Super Troopers is certainly one of the most over-achieving movies of the year.

Most comedy troupe-centered movies are abject failures, (see: Kids in the Hall: Brain Candy; most Saturday Night Live-based pictures) but Super Troopers manages to break the cycle, due mostly to very funny slapstick comedy and even better dialogue-based humour. And in an age when most Hollywood comedies are vehicles for questionably talented "comedians" like Adam Sandler, Rob Schneider and Tom Green, a pure comedy like Super Troopers is more than welcome.

The Broken Lizard members, all uniformed and mustached, star as members of the Vermont highway patrol who spend their days engaging in funny practical jokes both against each other and the passengers that they pull over. The patrolmen, however, are facing the elimination of their unit due to upcoming budget cuts, and are also embroiled in a feud/turf war with the local police of a nearby town. When the troopers stumble upon a local drug ring (marked by its logo, a pornographic Japanese cartoon character), it's up to them to stop it - and save their jobs in the process.

While Super Troopers may be nothing more than a collection of gags, they're all very funny gags. It certainly can't be called a character-based comedy (after all, it's hard to even tell most of the actors apart), but what's memorable is the physical material.

The best scenes are the group's attempts to break into a trailer park being held hostage by a rampaging hog, a setpiece when a character is distracting the evil cops by pretending to have sex with a bear, and "the school-bus incident," something referenced throughout the film and finally glimpsed over the closing credits.

The breakout presence among the stars is Steve Lemme (as a trooper smitten with the evil cops' receptionist). The grizzled character actor Brian Cox (Manhunter, Rushmore) gets to have a lot of fun as the crusty old leader of the troopers, and Jay Chandrasekhar (who also directed) gets to poke fun at his status as the only dark-skinned member of the troupe (and also, apparently, in the entire state of Vermont) with a running joke in which characters incorrectly guess his race.

The five members of Broken Lizard recently finished filming Club Dread, a comedy/musical co-starring Bill Paxton that's scheduled for release in 2003. If the winning Super Troopers is any indication, they've a considerable future ahead of them in big-screen comedy.