The Other Guys

Get a load of this cast: Will Ferrell, Mark Wahlberg, Eva Mendes, Michael Keaton, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, and Samuel L. Jackson. You could hardly go wrong with them, right? And I must say the critics mostly liked it. It’s a satire of cop buddy pictures. To say it’s over the top … well, there’s over the top and then there’s stratospheric. Jackson and Johnson are supercops, in the mold of Miami Vice, only much, much more reckless. They commandeer a double-decker bus full of tourists and use it in the opening car chase, totally destroying it and a shop and a lot of other cars. When a reporter asks if it was worth $12,000,000 in damage to catch a couple of punks, he is met with derision. New York loves these guys. Then, for no explicable reason, they jump off a twenty-story building, saying “Aim for the bushes!” And I fully expected them to land safely in a dumpster (those dumpsters only hold soft garbage, you know), but they surprised me, splattering themselves all over the sidewalk. The cinema magic must have stopped working for them. I sort of liked that idea. But it didn’t last.

So we meet the “other guys,” Ferrell and Wahlberg. They are partners but Ferrell just transferred in from the accounting department and is the total opposite of macho, while Wahlberg is itching for action. He’s not super competent or smart, though. While working security at Yankee Stadium he mistakenly shot Derek Jeter (played by himself). That was my biggest and only real laugh in what we saw. Because we bailed after about thirty minutes. I’m sorry, seeing a squad room full of cops behaving as childishly as second graders just ain’t all that funny to me. If I want to see infantile behavior I’ll just read about the latest tweets from Trump.