The Other Guys
By Nick Manteris · 0 Comments · Leave a Comment
Mark Wahlberg and Will Ferrell team up as The Other Guys in a buddy cop spoof that’s, well…a few drafts short of a greenlight. Someone obviously gave the go-ahead before the script was finished, but the director, Adam McKay, frequently sacrifices story for jokes when he’s working with Ferrell. Their past collaborations (Talladega Nights, Anchorman and Step Brothers) have benefitted from this method of storytelling, but when Ferrell plays a straight man and the movie actually pretends to have a plot then things play out somewhat differently than usual.
The film starts out with an over the top police duo, Highsmith and Danson (Samuel Jackson and Dwayne Johnson,) involved in an absurd car chase that quickly escalates into a gun battle. (If you’ve seen the trailer then you’ve seen most of this intro, complete with stale jokes like, “Did somebody call 9-1-holy sh…?”) Of course, the fact that Highsmith and Danson are super-cops is emphasized in order to juxtapose them with our protagonists, The Other Guys. Allen (Ferrell) is one of the other guys and he tries to take pictures of the super-cop duo, but Terry (Wahlberg,) the other other guy, tries to make him stop. (This is also in the trailer and I found it to be just as flat as the 911 joke.) The entire first part of the movie had a strange (flat) tone that wasn’t funny and I was beginning to worry that this film might be worse than MacGruber, but then Terry gave Allen an “I don’t like you” speech that finally initiated some comedy. I wish I could say that the laughs continued steadily from that point on, but they really didn’t. There are a few funny moments – mostly in the interactions between Allen and Terry – and they are spaced out somewhat unevenly through the film. Some stuff works: a few minor gags are referenced multiple times (how did they find the time?) and there’s one scene where they use the technique from Philips' Carousel ad (Carousel ad on Wiki) in an interesting way, but some stuff really doesn’t work so good: the tone is inconsistent and constantly jumps from serious to ridiculous and back just about every scene – for example, Terry is a total badass in one segment and then he’s completely out of touch with reality and clueless in another. A few of the gags are revisited a couple times too many and the bit with the music seems a little too close to what they did in MacGruber, but but the later use of the song “Monday Morning” eventually gives it a unique spin. About a quarter of the way into the movie, right after the “fist bump” scene with Highsmith and Danson, I thought to myself, “Maybe this would have been more funny if I had gotten high,” but that was mainly because I was one of the few people in the theater that didn’t laugh. (It’s too bad I don’t smoke pot or I could test out this particular theory.) On the flip side of that, I was practically the only one to laugh at the little girl who rides with the cops towards the end.
- Score
- 4/10
The Other Guys is full of unrealized potential – there are a lot of funny people in the cast that are barely used and one more rewrite would really have helped things out a lot. As it is, you might want to skip this film… it’s just not as good as some of the other films out there right now and it falls way behind some of the previous work from the people invoved. If you do decide to watch it though, the (surprisingly informative) end credit sequence is one of the best I’ve seen in a long time…even though it’s completely and totally depressing. There’s also a joke if you wait around after the credits. It’s not a particularly good one, but Wahlberg breaks character at the end and it’s worth sticking around for that.
