Movie Review: Quasi

Broken Lizard, the comedy team comprised of Jay Chandrasekhar, Kevin Heffernan, Steve Lemme, Paul Soter, and Erik Stohlhanske, has been making movies for over twenty years are responsible for some of the great cult comedies of the 2000s. While their movies are hilarious, one thing the Broken Lizard crew doesn’t get enough credit for is how good they are at paying homage to the specific genres of their films. Super Troopers, the film that put them on the map, is a great workplace comedy. Club Dredd is a bloody whodunnit mystery. And Beerfest is a perfect sports movie. Though they may make fun of the cliches in these genres, you can see that the guys do their research and are fans of the genre they pay homage to.

Quasi, the latest film from the Broken Lizard crew, pays homage to the medieval fantasy genre. It follows Quasi (Steve Lemme), a hapless hunchback yearning for love who works at a torture chamber in his local village and lives with his best friend Duchamp (Kevin Heffernan). Though he lives a simple life, Quasi is made fun of all over town because of his hunchback and speech impediment. 

Following a town-wide contest that Quasi wins, his life is thrown for a loop when he becomes entangled in a feud between the King of France (Jay Chandrasekhar) and the Pope (Paul Soter), who both hire Quasi to kill the other.

Inspired by the likes of Monty Python and Mel Brooks, Quasi is a medieval comedy that we have not seen in quite some time. What made Monty Python and the Holy Grail and Robin Hood: Men in Tights two of the best medieval comedies ever made was how perfectly the filmmakers blended parody and homage to medieval films and stories from decades before them, like King Arthur, Camelot, and Robin Hood, ones that focused on swashbuckling action, costumes, and sweeping love stories. 

But those kinds of medieval movies and stories don’t exist anymore. Now, medieval movies and stories are dark, violent, and sometimes disturbing, a clear effect from Game of Thrones, so it might be more difficult to pay homage to these violent, angry movies and shows, let alone make fun of their cliches. 

But the Broken Lizard guys were up to the challenge and they nailed it, paying homage to the medieval movies of the past and the present. They lean heavily into the obsession with violence and incestuous relationships that these shows and movies highlight. There are also several scenes of ludicrous violence, particularly in the torture chamber Quasi and Duchamp work in and the film’s final moments, that are amusing and silly, yet not unlike something we would see in a modern medieval film. Quasi isn’t only focused on the violence and sex of the modern medieval movie. Like the classic medieval stories, this is also a day/night romance and an underdog story about the triumph of Quasi with some surprisingly lavish costumes and sets.

Like all Broken Lizard films, Quasi is loaded with laughs. From smart, quick one-liners to movie-long bits, like the continued height growth of torture chamber-captive Michel (Erik Stolhanske), I found myself laughing the entire film. Some humor might come across as immature at times, but those are easy to forget when the rest of the humor is top-notch. The cast features all the Broken Lizard guys playing multiple roles and nearly all of the major roles in the film. The only non-Broken Lizard member to have a major role is Adrianne Palicki as Queen Catherine, the Queen of France who starts to take a liking to Quasi. She adds another level of humor to the film while also giving the film a level of class.

It is impressive what Broken Lizard has accomplished over the last twenty years. In a comedy landscape that is constantly changing and in a world that is tightening up what is offensive and what is not, Broken Lizard has always found a way to stay on top of the comedy game while never being offensive. Quasi is a hilarious good time and the best Broken Lizard film since Beerfest.

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