A Kevin Smith Joint – ‘Cop Out’ Review
Posted on March 9, 2010 - 11:13pm by michael
I may as well admit right off the bat that I went into
Cop Out totally unaware that it’s a
Kevin Smith film, and didn’t realize it all through the movie until the closing credits because the only thing it has in common with any other Kevin Smith films is
Jason Lee. This might be because Smith didn’t write the script, but check this out – when
Zack and Miri Make A Porno was released,
Roger Ebert recalled a conversation with Kevin Smith where he made the following important statement, “I don’t know sh** about directing, but I’m a f***ing good writer.”
Should we be worried then, that he still signed on to direct a movie that he didn’t write?
Whatever the case,
Cop Out is meant to be something of a spoof and something of an homage of buddy cop action movies in general, everything from
Lethal Weapon to
Blue Streak. I’ll admit that I have an almost inexhaustible love of these movies, and hardly ever find them repetitive, derivative or…ah…intrusive, but there is a way to make them (or any comedy) bad, and that’s to just not be funny. I know, that’s a little obvious, but the biggest crime for an unfunny comedy to commit is to have too many unfunny jokes that just go on for far too long, and
Cop Out is full of them.
The plot is simple enough. Tracy Morgan and Bruce Willis are New York cops with a relationship the just begs to be made into a ho-hum buddy cop movie. Jimmy (Willis) is an experienced cop struggling with his low salary while his daughter is getting married and his ex-wife’s new husband loves to taunt him for not being able to afford to pay for it. And Paul (Morgan) is Jimmy’s mouthy partner struggling with desperate suspicions that his wife is cheating on him. It won’t be any surprise when a sting operation goes wrong, a storefront gets all shot to hell and Jimmy and Paul end up getting chewed out by the police chief, who’s just about had enough of them. Personally I prefer the completely unintelligible chief in
Last Action Hero. That guy was
hilarious.
Needless to say, they get suspende
d for 30 days without pay, and just as I’m again wishing that I had a job where my boss would force me to take a month off, the movie has officially transformed into a giant cliché and it’s safe to look for your entertainment elsewhere. But just when
Seann William Scott enters and you think you might have something to laugh at, he ends up being responsible for the majority of the movie’s lengthy, unfunny jokes. Scott plays Dave. Jimmy had a classic baseball card that he was going to sell so he could pay for his daughter’s wedding, but Dave stole it and sold it for drugs. Jimmy makes Dave lead him to the Hispanic gangsters that he sold the card to, and they tell Jimmy that he can have the card back if Jimmy can just get back a beloved, stolen Mercedes.
[caption id="attachment_73841" align="alignleft" width="386" caption="Oooohhh! Tough guy!"]
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Anyway, you see where this is going. Jimmy needs to get that card back and pay for a wedding, Paul needs to find out if his wife is cheating on him, the gangster needs his car, and Dave needs to crack a lot of bad jokes at the expense of Paul’s vanity. Everyone puts in a sufficient performance, but there’s something missing that would have made the movie really memorable. It’s not a bad movie, just a run of the mill cop comedy that no one will argue is the best work from anyone involved. And it doesn’t help that the whole criminal element, the Mexican gangsters caricatures, involves a level of visceral violence that’s totally at odds with the comedy that the rest of the movie tries to convey. Seems that these two elements may have done better in separate movies. Fans of the leads will have a good time, but I recommend waiting for the DVD.
The Bean Meter
[caption id="attachment_73846" align="aligncenter" width="636" caption="Seann William Scott telling a joke, Bruce Willis not getting it, Tracy Morgan not caring."]
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