The Other Guys (Rhoades)

“The Other Guys” Are Also Funny
Reviewed by Shirrel Rhoades

We all know the “Good Cop-Bad Cop” routine, right? And in “The Other Guys” – the comedy action buddy cop movie that’s now playing at the Tropic Cinema – we see Will Farrell confuse that as “Bad Cop-Badder-Cop.”

Nevertheless, there are good cops to be seen … and then there are the other guys.

The other guys are bad. Not bad, as in mean. Bad, as in incompetent.

First up, we meet the mean-but-good cops, a couple of derring-do heroes personified by Samuel L. Jackson and Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. They always get their man. Everyone looks up to them.
As Jackson puts it, “All the car chases, all the sex we don’t wanna have with women but we have to, are all due to what you guys do. And we’d do it again and again.”

They are the Top Cops in the toughest city in the world.

But we (the audience) are saddled with the other guys. Frustrated Mark Wahlberg as a policeman who wants to let his inner peacock fly (no, peacocks don’t fly) and simpleton Will Farrell with his wooden gun. Being number two, they have to try harder. (Wait, make that number three or four.)

These mismatched cops don’t even get along. “I don’t like you,” snarls Wahlberg to his partner. “I think you’re a fake cop. If we were in the wilds I’d attack you. If I were a lion and you were a tuna I would swim out in the middle of the ocean and eat you.”

“First off, a lion swimming in the ocean?” retorts Farrell. “Lions don’t like water. If you’d placed it near a river or some sort of fresh water source, that’d make sense. But you find yourself in the ocean, with a twenty-foot wave, I assume it’s off the coast of South Africa, coming up against a full grown eight-hundred-pound tuna, with his twenty or thirty friends, you’d loose that battle, you’d loose that battle nine times outta ten.”

Farrell pauses. “Did that go the way you thought it was gonna go?” he says smugly.

“Nope,” admits Walhberg.

Nothing does.

Whether it’s facing jumpers, bullets, or bombs, the other guys seem to blunder into eventual success. Despite their ineptitude.

The plot’s somewhat superfluous, just an excuse to let Will Farrell display his Inner Child and Mark Wahlberg play his not-so-straight man.

If you’ve already seen all the other action movies and comedies out there, you’ll enjoy laughing at “The Other Guys.”

srhoades@aol.com
[from Solares Hill]