The Three Stooges (Film)

The film is composed of three acts, which are referred to as episodes (a reference to how the original Three Stooges short films were packaged for television by Columbia Pictures).

Act/Episode 1: More Orphan Than Not

Ever since Moe, Larry, and Curly were dumped on the doorstep of the Sisters of Mercy Orphanage, they have wreaked havoc in the place, leaving the nuns who run it utterly terrified. Out of desperation, when a prospective couple comes to adopt, the exasperated nuns bring out the trio as being the only three available, eventually adding a fourth when another boy, Teddy, enters the picture. The couple decides to pick Moe, but when he requests Larry and Curly join him, he is dropped back off at the orphanage, and they choose Teddy instead. 25 years later, the trio is still living there and attempting to help out taking care of the kids. When Monsignor Ratliffe arrives to give everyone an important message, he gets attacked by Moe, Larry, and Curly, who think that Monsignor Ratliffe was making out with the nuns. Monsignor Ratliffe is not going to adopt either of them either, as he is on official business. As they get wind that the orphanage will be shutting down unless they can come up with $830,000 in 30 days, the trio volunteers to go out and try to raise the money somehow.

Act/Episode 2: The Bananas Split

A subplot involves a woman named Lydia, who wants to kill her husband so she can be with her lover, Mac, and inherit her husband's considerable fortune. She offers to pay the trio the money they need to take care of the job. However, they botch the job and leave the supposed husband (actually Mac) in traction in the hospital. When they try to visit to finish the job, they are chased throughout the hospital and escape by jumping off the roof using a fire hose. They end up running into a now grown-up Teddy from the orphanage, who invites them to his anniversary party. It turns out that Lydia is Teddy's wife. Their next scheme for raising the money has them selling farm raised salmon, with them scattering salmon on a golf range and watering them like produce. The trio are chased off the golf course and hide somewhere, where they have a huge argument and slapstick fight. Larry and Curly then confronts Moe for not accepting the adoption with Ted's adopted parents because with the wealth they had, he could've used it to help save the oprhanage. They leave Moe alone immediately. After they do so, it turns out they were all on stage in front of an audition crew, who select Moe to be the newest cast member of Jersey Shore as "Dyna-Moe".

Final Act/Episode 3: No Moe Mister Nice Guy

Larry and Curly are getting along well without Moe but decide to go find him, first returning to the orphanage, where they find out a girl named Murph is very sick, but has not been taken to the hospital because the orphanage has no medical insurance. It turns out that no one will insure the orphanage due to the trio's numerous accidents and injuries, and the $830,000 is needed in order to cover medical bills that accumulated over the years. Larry and Curly later confronts Ted's adopted father about what happened at his office. He confessed that Moe wanted him to go back for his friends to adopt them and he didn't want to so he gave Moe back and took Ted in his place.

They finally go to the set of Jersey Shore to reunite with Moe, and they all head to the anniversary party where they appear to thwart the murder plot, only to get chased by the angry Lydia and Mac after they accidentally ruin their wedding cake while saving a little girl's life. They discover Teddy's adoptive father, a powerful attorney, was the real mastermind. He married into the money and was incensed to find out the money was left to Teddy and not him when Teddy's mother died years earlier. They are taken for a ride, but the car winds up in the water when Curly's pet rat distracts them; then, they all escape when Curly passes gas, and they light it with "waterproof, strike-anywhere matches" they had, causing enough of an explosion to blow out the windows.

Once they are back on land, Lydia, her lover, and Teddy's adoptive dad are arrested, and Teddy thanks the trio for saving him. When they request the $830K, he turns them down, stating he refuses to help the same orphanage that gave him up to a father that almost tried to kill him, among other things over the years.

Three months later, the trio return to the now-condemned orphanage, but as they start crying for feeling like failures, they hear kids laughing, swimming, and playing. When they investigate, they find out a whole brand new orphanage was built next door, complete with a swimming pool and tennis court.

They soon learn that the money came from the Jersey Shore's producers who consider this as an advance payment in relation to a new reality show "Nuns vs Nitwits", in which the entire trio will be part of. Murph is revealed to be perfectly fine, her illness due to too much iron in the water (which Larry had always suspected, yet no one listened to him), and that she, along with brothers Peezer and Weezer (the latter thought to have been lost forever to a foster home), will be adopted by Teddy and his new wife, Ling. In the end, after causing one more incident, the trio run away and bounce off trampolines out of the orphanage onto mules, where they ride off away from the orphanage, thus ending the film.

Postscript Epilogue

An epilogue consists of two young actors playing the Farrelly brothers, explaining that the stunts were all done by professionals, showing the foam rubber props used in the film for the trio to hit one another, demonstrating the fake eye-poke trick (to the eyebrows), and advising children not to try any of the stunts at home.

During the closing credits a music video plays showing the Stooges and Sister Rosemary performing "It's a Shame", originally recorded by The Spinners in 1970, interspersed with excerpts from deleted scenes and a couple of brief outtakes. Though credited to "The Spinners and The Three Stooges", Hudson's own distinctive vocals can also be heard.

in my opinion this is laugh out loud funny