Cop Out (2010)

Let me say this straight-up: Cop Out is a perfectly even by-the-numbers buddy cop comedy. If you told me that the script was by Shane Black (it’s not, as I’ll talk about later), I’d say “hey, this one fits right in”. There are no points that make you want to particularly walk out of the theatre, no dialogue that falls particularly flat, and in the end it’s fun for what it is. There are worse ways to spend an hour and a half or so watching this kind of thing. I’m not really into taking early dates to movies but if you’re of the opinion that they work because your date could have a good time and associate you with that good time, sure. Go ahead.

Not featured in the movie.

All of this sounds as though I’m damning the movie with faint praise. And, well… I guess I am. I’ve tried my best to avoid the hype leading up to this movie, even somehow finding a way to miss the fact that this movie was directed by one of my filmic heroes, Kevin Smith. I can’t help but be a little underwhelmed by this. I mean, it’s not the first time Smith has tried to take a risk-averse route to film-making. If anything, this works quite a lot better than Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back or Clerks 2. But those works, which can be seen as ways to wheedle fans of the Jersey Trilogy out of more of their cash or paeans to the world Smith created depending on how far you’re willing to give the guy the benefit of the doubt, failed because the Kevin Smith formula failed. And the Kevin Smith formula does have some risks associated with it – will the fans accept the raunchy humor, for example, particularly the big raunchy set-piece he used to like to throw into every movie (see: the donkey sex routine in Clerks 2, the quiz show that turned obscene in Mallrats, even the scene from Sweeney Todd in Jersey Girl). But this… this was someone else’s formula, a formula bereft of the risks.

A lot of what I describe are writing-related, and this film is unique in Smith’s history as being something he wrote but did not direct. That at first sort of absolves Smith from some of my criticism, but again I have to back to… why? Why Smith? No offense against the guy, but he’s really never been more than a functional director, someone who is perhaps best suited to put his own writing onto celluloid but not someone whose *direction* is particularly something you go to see. He doesn’t embarrass himself in this movie, certainly, but there are probably 50 people in Hollywood who don’t have a name attached who could do what Smith did here. I don’t know. Maybe it’s his lack of hubris that allowed this movie to work (in the sense that it worked) whereas a James Cameron or Uwe Boll would have insisted upon putting their own mark on it and in turn ruin the movie.

It's Tracy Morgan dressed up like a cell phone! What's not to like?

Again, I don’t want to make it sound like this was a bad movie. There was a great deal of chemistry between Tracy Morgan and Bruce Willis. Morgan has this way of half-acting and half-just being Tracy Morgan that leads to a great deal of hilarity on his sitcom 30 Rock but which probably makes everyone who tries to cast him in something wonder if it’ll work anywhere else. It works here. Bruce Willis is getting a bit older but he can still play the bad ass well. They share their fair share of dirty jokes – this is, after all, a Kevin Smith movie – but we’ve seen dirty cop humor many, many times before and so it’s not nearly as shocking as if it was, say, a guy stuck at a dead-end convenience store job and his community college-attending girlfriend making them. Also, it’s been 16 years since Clerks and the whole gross-out-your-audience meme got popular (okay, there’s John Waters, but from my own memory of Smith et al is that he tapped into an entirely different market than the guy who made Divine what she was).

Rarely have I wanted to punch Seann William Scott in the face as much as in this film. Kudos!

The writing skills of the Cullen Brothers really shine in the way he put together all the minor characters, from the non-estranged wife of Tracy Morgan (played by Rashida Jones of The Office and Parks and Recreation fame) to the singularly annoying character played by Seann William Scott to the baseball fanatic bad guy Poh Boy (Guillermo Diaz, whom Weeds fans may recognize). It’s clear that a good deal of care was given to these roles and others, to the point that when a character pops up more than once you’re happy to see them rather than wonder if the screenplay included extra facts about them just to make them slightly more memorable. In fact, I think that such a good job is done with most of the non-majors that when a recurring character was on the bland side, as with the cliched cop boss Captain Romans (Sean Cullen, but not the “the food of your choice will end your life tonight” Sean Cullen, who was incidentally on 30 Rock earlier this year… but I digress), it really sticks out.

One point I do have to give to Kevin Smith is with the editing. There is very little downtime in Cop Out. As soon as one scene needs to end, the next one generally begins. It’s not quite as frenetic as, say, the Bourne trilogy, but there’s no point here where it seems safe to sneak out for a pee break, and that’s certainly a plus for a movie like this.

So again, I’m not calling this a bad movie. Roger Ebert gave it 3 stars out of 4, which sounds about right to me. What it isn’t is the kind of movie you expect from Kevin Smith: 4 stars or 1.5 stars while it was sort of shooting for 4. This is probably a much better film for his pocketbook than those other ones. I for one just hope he’ll make enough money from this so he can get back to those sink-or-swim efforts I follow him for.

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