After enduring years of development hell, a shake-up that traded the compellingly bizarre team of Sean Penn, Jim Carrey, and Benicio Del Toro for the lowered expectations of Sean Hayes, Will Sasso, and Chris Diamantopolous, and a lengthy casting process that suggested the movie would be 90 percent nuns, the first look at The Farrelly Bros.’ The Three Stooges tribute has finally arrived, hoping to answer the question of whether all that time spent on their passion project was worth it. By way of answer, consider the preview’s opening gag of Larry David in a nun’s habit, screaming as he’s poked in the eyes by a baby—just the first of the movie’s many eye-related assaults, both literal and metaphorical.
Broken up into three separate but equal vignettes, The Three Stooges follows the trio as they come of age in an orphanage, get caught up in a murder mystery, and then end up on a successful reality show—and as you can surmise from that last plot point, the faithful recreations of the Stooges’ well-worn slapstick are interspersed with already-dated gags about iPhones and Jersey Shore, suggesting the live-action equivalent of movies like The Smurfs, where classic cartoon characters strike a uneasy balance between pandering nostalgia and postmodern cynicism about that nostalgia. Only this time, with more boobs—again, both metaphorical and literal. And if those are all you're after, you can also watch it in HD here.