Bobby Farrelly

The plot is a combination of The Blues Brothers and Fletch with a little “Jersey Shore” thrown in for … well, there’s never a good reason to include “Jersey Shore” is there?

But in this film, they lazily borrow the premise of “The Blues Brothers” (they have to raise money to keep the orphanage that has been their home since they were abandoned there as infants decades ago) and become entangled in a murder plot and “Jersey Shore.”

You would think that after having been wrestling with the project for than a decade that the Farrellys and co-writer Mike Cerrone might have been able to come up with a narrative that didn't consist of roughly 70% old bits and pieces cribbed directly from routines seen in the original Stooges shorts and the remaining 30% ported over from "The Blues Brothers."

This latest bit of naughty cinema never matches the heights of Judd Apatow’s The 40-Year-Old Virgin or the Farrellys’ own There’s Something About Mary, although it comes close in a few scenes.

After all, the whole notion of hiring contemporary actors to try to revive an act that succeeded as much as a result of the original performers and the comedic timing and rapport that they developed through years on the stage and in front of the movie cameras just seemed weird at best and potentially disastrous at worst, as anyone who saw the 1994 revival of "The Little Rascals" or that ersatz Laurel & Hardy feature featuring Bronson Pinchot as Laurel and someone else as Hardy, a creation so bizarre and unsettling to behold that when I stumbled upon it on cable one bleak morning completely unawares as to its existence, I thought I was genuinely cracking up for good.

This is Larry (Sean Hayes: Soul Men , Igor ), Curly (Will Sasso: Life as We Know It ), and Moe (Chris Diamantopoulos), and screenwriter-director Farrelly brothers Peter and Bobby ( The Heartbreak Kid , Shallow Hal ) figure they can attach a plot to this -- about Sofia Vergara ( New Year's Eve , Happy Feet Two ) hiring them to kill her husband, holy god make it stop -- and it will be acceptable entertainment to those who have achieved control of their bowels.

Directed by Peter and Bobby Farrelly, who had been eyeing this as their dream project since before they made “There’s Something About Mary,” the new film attempts to bring the time-tested Stooges slapstick formula to the present day, complete with loads of modern pop culture references.

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.

If it weren’t for the iconic series from which their pop culture gene pool originated, the Farrelly brothers would be criticised for making full throttle fun of retarded people in ways more extreme than the mental handicaps they’ve previously leveraged jokes on, such as Mary’s brother in There’s Something About Mary (1998) and Jim Carrey’s multiple personal disorder in Me Myself and Irene (2000).

Relying on the simple slapstick that characterized a variety of two-reel shorts, lasting 15-18 minutes, dating back to 1934-1946, by the manic comedic trio known as The Three Stooges, Peter and Bobby Farrelly (“Dumb & Dumber,” “There’s Something About Mary”) have retained, revived and re-created their nostalgically amusing antics.

My initial reaction couldn't have been far wrong, either, because I see that the writers and directors of "Dumb and Dumber," Peter and Bobby Farrelly, plan to do a film before long called, not surprisingly, "The Three Stooges."

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.

Stoller isn't mean-spirited in the way that the Farrelly brothers were in a similar set-up, the dreadful remake of "The Heartbreak Kid" with Ben Stiller.