Mr. Movie review: ‘Captain Underpants’ is the year’s funniest movie

While not the exact definition of epic, Captain Underpants: The First Epic Movie is epically funny.

That’s epic with a capital E.

Captain Underpants is one of those films that makes you wish you had been a fly on the wall when it was written. That might have been almost as much fun as the film.

Almost.

Kevin Hart and fairly unknown character actor Thomas Middleditch are the voices of gradeschoolers George and Harold.

They live next door to each other and have been best friends and classmates since kindergarten. The boys are artists who’ve drawn a crude comic book called Captain Underpants.

They’re also incurable practical jokers who torment classmates and their principal, Mr. Krupp. He finally catches them in the act and separates them into different classrooms.

For the boys it is practically the end of the world. Desperate, they hypnotize Krupp and turn him into Captain Underpants. Of course, that leads to impossible-to-control circumstances and piles of laughter.

Based on Dav Pilkey’s novels and penned by Nicholas Stoller (Storks, The Muppets, Muppets Most Wanted), Captain Underpants creatively and with great skill takes on school authority and monotone-voiced teachers.

Or — in other words — it’s an adult’s view of how a kid might see gradeschool.

While most of us may not remember our early education being quite that tuneless and drab, it is easy to see how Pilkey and Stoller could have viewed theirs that way.

However you see it, you will totally enjoy how they — and director David Soren (Turbo) — see things.

Captain Underpants is laugh-out-loud funny. You’ll need to see it twice to catch the obvious jokes missed while you’re laughing and rolling on the theater floor. The second time will also help you catch the not-so-obvious, very subtle jokes that are easily missed.

This story was originally published June 1, 2017 at 2:51 PM with the headline "Mr. Movie review: ‘Captain Underpants’ is the year’s funniest movie."