Thirty-five years in the past, the children at the Sisters of Mercy Orphanage are playing soccer with an old soda can in the frontyard.

Later, three destructive infants, Moe, Larry and Curly, are thrown in a duffel bag onto the orphanage's doorstep from an unknown person's car.

Ten years later, desperate to be rid of the three, the nuns tell a prospectively adoptive couple that the trio are the only three children available.

The couple, the Harters, decides to pick Moe; but when he requests that Larry and Curly join him, they take him back to the orphanage and choose Teddy instead.

Then it turns out that 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".

Meanwhile, Moe has been causing a lot of havoc on Jersey Shore by slapping, eye-poking and head-bopping the cast members and not putting up with their spoiled antics.

Larry and Curly finally go to the set of Jersey Shore to reunite with Moe and they all head to the anniversary party where they show up to thwart the murder plot, getting in as balloon men.

They are taken for a ride, but the car crashes into a lake when Curly's pet rat Nippy digs into Lydia's cleavage.

They all escape when Curly farts, and Moe ignites it with some "easy-light, waterproof safety matches" that Larry had, causing enough of an explosion to blow out the windows.

When the trio requests the $830,000 from Teddy, he declines, stating he refuses to help the same orphanage that gave him up to a father that tried to kill him along with other things Mr. Harter did to him after he adopted him.

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 take part.

Murph is revealed to be perfectly fine, and her illness was due to metal poisoning (with Larry saying he has always suspected there was too much iron in the water).

In the end, after Curly accidentally knocks Sister Mary-Mengele into the pool with a folded-up diving board as the orphange celebrates the adoption, the trio run away, bounce off some trampolines over the hedge and onto some mules, on which they clumsily ride away into the distance.

During the end 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.

[7] In November 2010, MGM filed bankruptcy and the following month the project was taken over by 20th Century Fox in hopes to have released the film in 2011.

"[10] In March 2009, Benicio del Toro and Hank Azaria were in consideration to play the lead role of Moe Howard.

[17] Larry David plays another nun in the film called Sister Mary-Mengele,[18] a character named after the infamous Nazi doctor.

[21] The cast of Jersey Shore (Nicole Polizzi, Michael Sorrentino, Sammi Giancola, Jennifer Farley, and Ronnie Ortiz-Magro) have cameos in the film.

[22][23] On a reported budget of $30 million,[citation needed] principal photography started on May 9, 2011, in downtown Atlanta, Georgia and wrapped on July 20, 2011.

[23][24] Scenes were shot at the Fairlie-Poplar Historic District around 5 Points Sports Building on the corner of Peachtree St., Edgewood Ave., and Decatur St. on the evening and night of May 13 and wrapped the next day.

[24] Other locations included Piedmont Park, Emory Saint Joseph's Hospital, Zoo Atlanta, and Colony Square.

[25] Filming concluded on July 22, 2011, at the Miami Seaquarium, a popular marine life park in Florida, capturing a scene in their dolphin tank.

They acted in several scenes, the first with Santino Marella, before later taking to the ring where they were booed by an infuriated crowd before Sasso, dressed as Hulk Hogan, received a chokeslam by Kane.

"[36] Some critics, however, complained about the forced pop culture references such as cameos by Jersey Shore cast members which were presumably done to ensure the movie would have youth appeal and not simply be a nostalgia trip for older audiences.

Betsy Sherman of The Boston Phoenix gave it three out of four stars, saying it was "funny and faithful", and added that the film contains "stories that could have graced [the Stooges]' 1930s shorts (raise money to save an orphanage, stumble into a greedy wife's plot) onto the present and imagine how they'd interpret modern concepts (farm-raised salmon)".

[37] Peter Travers of Rolling Stone magazine gave it two stars out of four, commenting that "the movie is a mixed bag.

"[38] James White of Empire gave the film a two out of five stars, saying, "The mooted Stooges – Sean Penn, Jim Carrey, Benicio del Toro – dodged a bullet judging by this muddle of creaky slapstick and laugh-free plotting.

Both are potential causes for the offense for different reasons, as Moviefone reports: In Stooges, David portrays Sister Mary-Mengele.

The name is a nod to the late Nazi Josef Mengele, an SS Officer who decided the prisoners' fates at Auschwitz.

[19]Close-up footage of Upton exiting the pool in front of a group of children (which Curly comments that there’s something different about her and asks if she got a haircut) appears in the film's trailer, but not in the movie itself nor DVD/Blu-ray deleted scenes; in the final film, she is only seen sitting in a chair and briefly in the background of a group shot while in her swimsuit (in her other scenes, she is dressed in standard nun attire).