The Other Guys is one of those films whose trailers and posters are funnier than the film itself. Will Farrell and Mark Wahlberg star as Gamble and Hoitz, two desk-bound cops working under the shadow of the city's superstar policemen, Danson and Highsmith (played by Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson and Samuel L. Jackson, respectively). Farrell is content and safe doing paperwork all day, but Wahlberg, pissy to a degree only attainable through some sort of freak male menapause, longs to get out and bust heads like their heros. So when their chance unexpectedly hits, the unlikely pair must get out there and save the day.
Sound familiar? It's supposed to. The Other Guys is a satire of all things "buddy cop movie", and it does get a few chuckles, mostly from Farrell's deadpan analysis of the utterly ridiculous, like when Wahlberg, clearly excited by some plot point or another, explains that the rush of being a cop in the field "gives you a tingling feeling in your balls", to which Farrell matter-of-factly observes, "Are you sure you don't just have testicular cancer?" Farrell's performance, with a few exceptions, carried practically all of the laughs for the film.
Wahlberg, meanwhile, just looked frustrated. I haven't seen him in very much (The Departed, The Italian Job, Planet of the Apes), but I heard he was atrocious in both The Happening and The Lovely Bones, and, sadly, The Other Guys is no exception. You would think it'd be hard to mess up being the straight guy of a buddy cop duo, but Marky Mark pulled it off. His only two redeeming moments were when you learned about why he's not allowed to do fieldwork (but that was the writing, not the actor) and the way he reacts to Farrell's wife, played by Eva Mendes (again, mostly the writing). He had no volume control. He would suddenly and violently leap from a calm, inside-voice to YELLING AT THE TOP OF HIS LUNGS LIKE THE SCRIPT WAS WRITTEN IN ALL-CAPS. I believe this was done for humor, and the first time or two it wasn't quite unfunny, but when this happened every few minutes for two straight hours, it became painful. If anyone out there finds yelling hilarious, then football season just started back up. Go out to a game and knock yourself out.
One of the film's best surprises, though, was the pair's police captain, played by none other than Michael Keaton. I'm pleased to see the man making such a comeback this year (he previously provided the voice for the hilarious Ken doll in Toy Story 3). There's nothing like seeing a balding police captain doubling as a floor manager for Bed Bath & Beyond ("Alright everybody, we have a serial killer making hits around 1st and King street - oh, sorry! Wrong job. Um, well, if any of you live in that area... be careful.) while constantly saying lines that turn out to be the names of TLC songs, like when he tells Farrell and Wahlberg, as a means of getting them to stop pursuing the film's main case, "Don't go chasing waterfalls." Very random, but surprisingly funny. I dearly hope that Keaton once again becomes a staple of American cinema. He has surprisingly good comedic timing for a man who once starred in Multiplicity. But then again, he also played Beetlejuice. What an odd assortment of characters Michael Keaton has played over the course of his life, eh?
The film's most confusing moment, however, came in its credits. See, the plot has to do with some big business financial shenanigans that I won't go into, but for the entirety of the credits, an army of notes, diagrams, pie charts, bar graphs, etc. played behind the listings for Best Boy and Key Grip explaining how much money CEOs make nowadays in relation to their workers, how much the banks got in the recent bailout, and so on. For a movie all about satire, providing a laundry list of true, unfunny facts seemed completely out of place. Perhaps they wanted to make you laugh at how much more your boss makes than you do, but I assure you I wasn't laughing. Very unnecessary. Leave that kind of thing to Michael Moore, if you must, and then let Trey Parker and Matt Stone make a fat, hot-dog-eating puppet version of him and blow him up in Team America: World Police.
For the most part, though, I thought the movie very ho-hum. One of the film's funniest moments - when the crimefighting duo are near a building that explodes, and Farrell, while writhing on the ground clutching his ears, yells about how he can't believe how the macho guys in the movies can always walk away with explosions behind them - was played so often in the trailers that, when it finally happened in the real movie, it wasn't funny anymore. That's not the filmmakers' fault, of course, but I always hate it when trailers for comedies (and action movies, for that matter - *cough*LastAirbender*cough*) show all the best parts. The plot was predictable, and it was supposed to be, but the film's humor wasn't enough to keep me entertained, nor was the action very interesting. And somebody, please, tell Mark Wahlberg that yelling does not equal funny unless it's the book How to Train Your Dragon and your target audience is a bunch of 10-year-old boys.
Best line: Aim for the bushes.
I leave you now with a video that played during Alamo Drafhouse's always-excellent pregame-show, which also included several police training videos that had to be from the 60's or before. Enjoy!
No comments:
Post a Comment