Jake Johnson and Damon Wayans Jr. are hilarious guys and great comedic actors—and anyone who’s seen the work they’ve done together during the latest season of New Girl can tell you that they have the chemistry necessary to make for a solid onscreen duo. So it makes sense why someone would want to make a big screen comedy and put them in the starring roles. What doesn’t make sense, however, is why Johnson and Wayans, who are both at points in their careers where they’re getting the opportunity to make lots of great stuff, would agree to attach themselves to a script that’s as lame as the one that became Let’s Be Cops.
The premise of the film—that two underachieving man-children who dress up as cops for a costume party discover that people give them the respect they’ve been unable to achieve in real life while in uniform then decide to exploit the deference shown to police officers by continuing to dress up in the outfits and act like big shots—is fertile enough ground for comedy in theory, but in execution this script proves to be little more than a mixed bag of lame gags and overly serious dramatic subplots that add up to a tonally confused mess. Johnson and Wayans are good enough at delivery that they’re able to get a handful of laughs out of the material, but that’s almost a miracle when said material mostly consist of well-worn racist outrage-baiting, rapey scenarios involving lecherous men, fear of homosexuality, and silly prat falls. A handful of laughs aren’t nearly enough to keep this one from going straight into the toilet.
Especially because the humor is so broad, and the protagonists are so silly, but then a serious story involving gangsters, police corruption, and life or death situations keeps butting in and getting in the way of the jokes. Unless you’re an elite talent, like say the Coen brothers or something, you can’t have it both ways. You can either have a police movie where the protagonists are real people and the audience is supposed to take the action seriously, or you can have a cop comedy where the protagonists are cartoon characters and the plot stuff doesn’t much matter. Co-writer/director Luke Greenfield is apparently not a Coen brother, because Let’s Be Cops plain doesn’t work. This is a movie that asks you to believe that an impeccably quaffed Nina Dobrev waits tables at a greasy spoon for a living, creates horror movie makeup in her spare time, and also doesn’t have a boyfriend. You can’t introduce a premise that ridiculous and then ask us to treat your shootout scenes as if they exist in any sort of reality or that anyone important could be put in any actual danger by them. What we have here is a decent premise for a movie that unfortunately got taken out of the oven when it was still only half-baked.
