I find it strange that in a cinematic climate where the buddy cop movie is all but dead and buried, The Other Guys is the second satire of the genre that I’ve seen this summer. The first of which was Kevin Smith’s Cop Out, and I didn’t like that one at all. This one, while not a total success, addresses a lot of the complaints that I had about Smith’s film and gets more of the little things right. Firstly, Cop Out skipped the meat and potatoes of the buddy cop film, the getting to know you storyline between the two principles. In his film, Bruce Willis’ grizzled old cop and Tracy Morgan’s wacky loose cannon had been partners for years. We didn’t get to watch the fun of the two chaffing against one another, but eventually coming together as BFFs while under extreme danger. Here, writer/director Adam McKay gives us all of that, so his film is a step ahead of the competition already. Tonally, I felt that Cop Out had a lot of problems. This is understandable when you’re dealing with satire. How much do you do straight comedy, and how close can you get to replicating the thing you’re referencing without it turning from parody into just a rip-off? I didn’t quite feel like Cop Out ever found it’s voice, with the action never having any real stakes, Willis playing things a bit grounded and at face value, and Morgan going broad and acting like he was in a complete farce. Here, things feel a lot more natural. The action, while making fun of the over the top nature of cop films, is able to also stand on it’s own as being fun to watch and full of thrills rather than just wink filled homage. The actors play off each other well, hitting the same sweet spot between getting laughs and presenting the story seriously enough to keep it relevant. Everybody in The Other Guys feels like they could be a real character in a cop movie, just cranked up a notch to look totally ridiculous. This isn’t to say that McKay and crew got everything right. They did get the fundamentals of making a parody right. They didn’t fall into any of the traps that made Cop Out an incoherent mess. But, especially when you take into account McKay’s other films, I felt like I should have had a much better time watching this than I did.
The movie, as it was sold to us in the trailers, is a film about a couple of mundane, desk jockey cops who are always overshadowed by the testosterone driven, shoot ‘em up superstars of the police force. The two superstar cops are Highsmith (Samuel L Jackson) and Danson (Dwayne Johnson), and they certainly hold up their end of the bargain. High-speed chases down crowded streets, shootouts in public places, clever quips, extreme property damage; all of the ingredients of the stereotypical movie cop duo are all there. Where the film doesn’t quite deliver what’s promised is with its title and where the story goes. I thought this was supposed to be the story of “the other guys”. I thought it was going to be the story of the boring cases that Officers Gamble (Will Ferrell) and Hoitz (Mark Wahlberg) have to trudge through while everyone pays attention to the excitement surrounding Highsmith and Danson. A story about the little guy and the lack of recognition they get for doing all the grunt work. Maybe they would get tired of the treatment and try to prove that they were just as important as Highsmith and Danson, probably there would be some competition between the two duos. Instead, Jackson and Johnson’s characters get written out of the film very early, do little to no interacting with Ferrel and Wahlberg, and then the story just follows Ferrell and Wahlberg as they act like they’re the big time movie cops anyways. There’s no real focus on “the other guys” whatsoever. As a matter of fact, Gamble and Hoitz get involved in a high profile, multi-billion dollar corporate fraud case that ends up looking a lot like plots that I’ve seen in real cop movies hundreds of times already. There’s no real exploration of the other side of police work at all, and because of that, and because of the lack of interaction between who I thought were going to be the four big stars of the film, I started to get pretty disappointed pretty quick.
It turns out that while Jackson and Johnson actually function as little more than cameos in this film, there is another duo of policemen that become the protagonist’s rivals played by Rob Riggle and Damon Wayans Jr. With Highsmith and Danson out of the picture, it becomes a competition between Gamble and Hoitz and Riggle and Wayans’ characters to see who is going to step up and fill their shoes. Their exploits center around a case filled with corporate fraud and misappropriated funds. And here is where the film really starts to stumble. Riggle and Wayans’ characters are the most wet blanket, unfunny tandem of rival jerk cops that I’ve ever seen in a police film, comedy or otherwise. They have no definable traits, they never do anything funny, and they’re never even that obnoxiously jerky. What gives? The ponzi scheme case that the police work on is not at all interesting, it take way too much expository dialogue to explain, and it really starts to bog down the comedic flow of the film. Instead of something simple like a jewel heist that can be glossed over and serve as a loose framework to fit gags and action sequences into, we get a bunch of boring talk about corporations, stock exchanges, potential investors, and off-shore accounts. Suddenly, a concept that seemed rife with a lot of comedic potential starts to circle the drain very quickly. This film is just flat out not as funny as it should have been. The random one-liners aren’t near up to par with the ones we’ve gotten out of other recent, largely improvised comedies. Ferrell and Wahlberg are given too much explaining and not enough goofing around to do. Riggle and Wayans seem out of their element and aren’t able to muster up much of anything. And by the end of the film Johnson and Jackson were the most fun thing we get, and they only stick around for about ten minutes. If this had been a more straightforward story, if we would have gotten Ferrell and Wahlberg going up against Jackson and Johnson instead of Riggle and Wayans, McKay might have really had something here. As is, what we get is his worst film to date.
But despite my overall disappointment, there are some performances here that are fun to watch. As I said, Samuel L Jackson and Dwayne Johnson are full of energy and charisma, and they make the most of what they get while they’re on screen. Ferrell does a great job as Gamble, a straight-laced police accountant who gets a bigger charge out of filing paper work than he does unholstering his firearm. The role causes Ferrell to play things a little more close to the vest and dryly than he usually does, and it’s a nice change of pace for him. He is given a few opportunities to really shoot for the moon with broad material, but largely his is a small performance of nuance and understated reactions to out there situations. It’s my favorite bit of work I’ve seen him do in a while. Wahlberg is serviceable, if not spectacular as Hoitz, a fallen from grace police officer who has been saddled with a desk job and a lame partner due to past mistakes. He’s able to make me laugh a few times, and he’s believable in the role, but often times he is a bit out of his depth trying to riff next to a comedic titan like Ferrell. Someone with a stronger improvisational and comedic background might have been more effective overall. My favorite performance of the film might have come from Ray Stevenson, who plays the ultra capable head of security to the scheming Bernie Madoff-esque villain of the piece. A lot of things that Riggle and Wayans did wrong, Stevenson does right. Stevenson crafted a character, played him straight, and is able to get some laughs having other characters bounce off of what he’s established. Riggle and Wayans played things more over the top, didn’t ever really establish any definable traits in their characters, and tried to rely on cocky smirks to garner their share of the laughs. They sucked in roles that were supposed to be largely comedic and Stevenson was actually pretty funny in a role that was supposed to be more of a side character, utilitarian to the plot rather than a source of comedy. Michael Keaton shows up as the police chief who has to juggle putting up with his department’s antics with a night job at Bed, Bath, & Beyond. He seems to be playing an amped up version of police characters that he has played before in films like Jackie Brown, and he’s able to get some laughs by making fun of himself and his snorting, gum chewing, almost too casual take on blue collar characters. Eva Mendez impressed me in a criminally small role as Gamble’s homely, but loyal and doting wife. She really commits to her role, it’s a funny enough concept, and I wish she had gotten more screen time to explore it. Will Ferrell being bored with and unenthusiastic about seeing Eva Mendez naked every day is a conceit that could have at least got another ten minutes of jokes dedicated to it. I can’t imagine that Mendez is that funny of a person in day-to-day life, but there’s a difference between doing comedy and being a capable comedic actor. She seems like she’s more than capable of pulling off comedic acting, and it’s something refreshing to see in a starlet as attractive as her. Women never get anything to do in these sorts of films.
So, there are those performances, and a handful of other things to make The Other Guys worth checking out. I’ve said that the one-liners weren’t up to my expectations. There’s a running joke about flying peacocks that’s never funny. Still, a good amount of the humor is able to hit home. The way Jackson and Johnson are written out of the script just about made me do a spit take. There’s a dialogue about lions fighting tuna that goes on just long enough to be absurdly hilarious. Ferrell and Wahlberg’s reaction to going to see Jersey Boys shouldn’t be missed. And, a running gag about Gamble’s dark past and how it tends to bubble up to the surface is comedic gold and delivers a lot of the bigger laughs. There’s also a scene late in the film that really stood out to me, where Gamble and Hoitz should be gearing up for their big climactic showdown with life and death consequences, but instead they spend their night trying to repair their romantic relationships. It’s just the kind of stupid thing that would really happen in a police movie and it worked as great parody. Usually something worth skewering the way this film skewers cop movies is stupid enough on it’s own. Just being a warped reflection of it is funny enough. When you start to go too big, when you start to be a too over the top, cartoonish mockery of your subject, the train tends to go off the rails. That’s one of the things Cop Out didn’t get. It swung for the fences when all we needed was a bunt.
And never is the skill of this film as satire more on display than it is during its action sequences. The action in this film is over the top, yes. It’s completely unbelievable. Things explode when they shouldn’t, the laws of physics are bent to the point of breaking, people take way more punishment than they should be able to, far too many bullets fly around for nobody to be hit, etc… But where the action sequences succeed as comedy, is that they never go more than one step further than a real cop movie would. You get the characters smashing up an entire city street to get a simple drug bust; you don’t get them using a bazooka to get a cat out of a tree. The first joke makes a comment on the absurdity of action films; the second is just absurd. One is parody, the other hacky. And where the action sequences succeed as straight-up action is that they are just flat-out fun to watch. A lot of money was put into the action of this film. The special effects look great; the stunt work is top notch. The editing of the sequences is quick and energetic, but easily followed, and with a strong sense of spatial relations. They’re choreographed for maximum carnage, and performed with explosive enthusiasm. They work so much as actual filmic action, that I found myself really interested at what McKay might be able to produce if he ditched comedy for a project or two and took a shot at making a real, straight forward action film. It couldn’t be any worse than what we’ve been getting in the genre.
