Random Movie: Cop Out (2010)

Back in February after the release of Cop Out was bombarded with negative reviews from many different critics, director Kevin Smith took to Twitter to explain how reviewers were out of touch with the general movie going populace. His main point (and this is from memory because I am damn sure not going back through all of Smith’s tweets to refresh) was that reviewers did not appreciate the movie for what it was intended to be: a light buddy-cop comedy with throwbacks to its 80s brethen. Less than twenty-four hours after watching a movie that did successfully replicate a lost 80s movie (that would be Piranha, review here), I can safely say that may have been the intention here but a bad movie got in the way.

Taking the old buddy-cop formula, Cop Out does absolutely nothing else with it. Here we have two partners who are loose cannons, destroy things in downtown New York City, get reprimanded and suspended by their captain, and yet continue to investigate a theft and a drug-smuggling ring outside of their authority. As you can tell by that brief synopsis, there is very little original or defining here that you cannot see in the dozens of other buddy-cop movies. In fairness to Smith, Cop Out is not the warning sign of the apocalypse as some reviews might make it out to be. It has its moments but those are mostly contained in the final act, long after any patience you had has worn thin. The biggest flaw is that for a comedy, there is very little humor that does not revolve around Tracy Morgan acting like a ten-year-old or the Kevin Smith standard of dick and fart jokes.

Even though I rather enjoy Morgan in other projects, he is playing the same exact character as everything else I have seen him in. His shtick of a loud-mouthed, self-involved, aggravating manchild works in short bursts on 30 Rock and SNL sketches but only in moderation. Here we have the bulk of the movie where his character Paul is constantly bickering, whining, or just being inept to the point that I cannot fathom how anyone in production thought he could be sold as a cop, let alone one that is a tenured detective. And if there is anything that Bruce Willis can sell, it should be a gruff, city cop but he looks so damn bored here that I could not even buy that.

Aside from the A-plot about Willis’ character Jimmy’s stolen baseball card as it leads to a Mexican drug cartel, both detectives have problems at home as Paul is insanely jealous and convinced that his wife is cheating on him while Jimmy is desperately trying to pay for his daughter’s wedding with the sale of the aforementioned rare and valuable baseball card. Short of the dubious connection with the card and paying for the wedding, these side stories rarely factor into the larger narrative making things incredibly irritating as the already slow progress of investigating is slammed to a halt while Paul cries like a baby over his wife’s alleged infidelities.

Things would have been better served in the movie if the comedic aspect was downplayed while the action sequences were more pronounced. After all, think of other previous cop films like Die Hard or Lethal Weapon which worked as action films with a hint of facetiousness, not reversed. We know that Smith can do comedy damn well but he just was not on his game here so the only time I was not bored silly was during car chases, foot chases, or gunfights. In fact, all of those scenes had very little dialogue which means that we can place some blame on the pair of writers. But Smith should fire himself from the editing duties after this as even scenes or jokes that are threadbare to begin with are stretched to a painstaking length (which almost any scene with Seann William Scott fits here). The child in the backseat repeating others, Paul wearing a cell phone costume hours after it was necessary, a fake phone conversation to talk shit about two rival detectives, and more scenes all began badly but were drawn out to the point of potential self-inflicted harm.

I tried to go into this movie with an open mind as I have reveled in films designated as crap by others before. However, when I am praying for the movie to come to a quick resolution around the thirty-five minute mark, someone has clearly overestimated the entertainment value of bickering and toilet humor.