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For something considered a Hollywood staple, the buddy-cop comedy has seen some lean years. Kevin Smith’s Cop Out almost killed the genre outright.
So here’s good news re: The Other Guys, the movie that pairs Will Ferrell and Mark Wahlberg as a pair of pathetically outcast New York cops looking to climb out of the bottom of the NYPD food chain. To wit: Will Ferrell actually has a funny movie out.
Though, it’s not going to unseat, say, 48 Hours, The Other Guys is a hilarious comedy that sails on absurdly-angry comic chemistry between Ferrell and Wahlberg and the sharp improvisational working relationship between Ferrell and his director-soulmate Adam McKay.
Ferrell and Wahlberg? Who knew?
Well, it’s not a huge surprise. Wahlberg was the funniest thing in Date Night, he did help create TV’s Entourage, and he’s been lightening up his image all the way back to I Heart Huckabees.
He is every bit as funny as Ferrell in this movie. But it’s their characters’ mile-wide differences that spreads the laughs. Far preferable to watching Ferrell try to do it himself for an entire movie.
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Pretty much everything that works in The Other Guys is some kind of spoof of a buddy-cop cliche. The movie opens sublimely with a pair of maverick “super-cops” — Dwayne (The Rock) Johnson and Samuel L. Jackson — causing millions of dollars of damage in car chases over minor drug offences. Jackson brings so much of his trademark derangement to this brief role that it made me long for a sequel to Pulp Fiction (or even Snakes on a Plane).
However, when the city’s heroes get taken out, a vacuum is created in the NYPD. A new pair of super-cops must rise, and the least likely candidates are Allen Gamble (Ferrell) and Terry Hoitz (Wahlberg), two misanthropes thrown together as partners more or less as mutual punishment. Gamble is an action-phobe who became a police clerical worker to fight crime without actually putting himself in danger.
Hoitz, meanwhile, is a maverick whose career took a dive after he accidentally shot the New York Yankees’ Derek Jeter (who plays himself in a flashback). The incident attaches the nickname “The Yankee Clipper” to Hoitz (and jibes like “Why couldn’t you have shot A-Rod instead?”)
But when Gamble hits bureaucratic paydirt, and seeks to arrest a real-estate billionaire/finance guru (Steve Coogan) on a workplace-safety violation, the two find themselves on a major-league case — forcing tough-guy Wahlberg to reconcile himself to working with a wimp. Gamble drives — gasp! — a Prius, where he endlessly plays Australian soft-rockers Little River Band. “I feel like I’m literally inside a vagina!” Hoitz says.
As in most of these movies, the plot is a contrivance — even less so here, since so much seems like stuff Ferrell and company improvised that day. Gamble’s wife (Eva Mendes) kicks him out, and they reconcile by having her aged mother (Viola Harris) play go-between, delivering sex talk back and forth between the estranged lovers. Michael Keaton plays the squad captain, who inexplicably speaks in snippets of lyrics from the ’90s girl band TLC.
For some reason the scattershot silliness works, producing one of the highest laugh ratios of any movie this summer.
(This film is rated PG-13)