THE OTHER GUYS Review

I am at a bit of a loss where Adam McKay's The Other Guys is concerned.

On one hand it is stilted, cliched stuff that rides wafer thin characters into the ground across a flimsy premise. It is more a series of moments than any sort of coherent story and it does a ton of things wrong. The Other Guys, by most standards, is not a good movie. It is clumsy and ill conceived and poorly executed, even allowing for the normal conventions of the genre.

On the other hand, however, it made me laugh. A lot. Which is a comedy's primary job so if it succeeded on that front is it really fair to label it a bad movie?

The film begins following super cops Highsmith and Danson (Samuel L Jackson and Dwayne Johnson, respectively) on a ludicrous high speed chase through city streets. It's the sort of chase that would make the producers of the Lethal Weapon movies blush with shame at how outlandish and over the top it is, one that ends with what is admittedly one of the better sight gags I've seen in an action comedy in recent days. Highsmith and Danson are the ultimate cops, real life heroes, like something taken out of Joel Silver's wet dreams and dropped into real life. They are also, as you may have guessed from the title, not the point of the film. This is a film about the other guys.

When Danson and Highsmith meet an unfortunate end early in the film - another fantastic sight gag given to deaths that couldn't come early enough, as Sam Jackson's continued descent into self parody is just becoming painful to watch and Johnson's continued willingness to slum it in inferior material just makes me angry - it leaves a void on the hero-cop front, one that someone must step in to. But who? Surely not the odd-couple partnership of Terry Hoitz (Mark Wahlberg) and Alan Gamble (Will Ferrell)?

Yeah, of course it is. They're the guys on the poster and, honestly, the film takes way too long to get to it's real beginning. The relationship between the two cops is meant to be the engine that drives this particular train. Hoitz is a typical alpha-male with anger issues, his career derailed after accidentally shooting Derek Jeter in the foot, Gamble a mild tempered forensic accountant transferred from the fraud division to the major crime detective squad for reasons unknown. Gamble loves to stay in an do paperwork. Hoitz declares himself a peacock who needs to fly. Sadly this is all there really is to this relationship. It goes no farther.

The plot, such as it goes, is this. Steve Coogan stars as a shady investment banker who has lost a small fortune for one of his clients and is now under instructions to swindle someone else out of that same small fortune to replace the lost funds. The cost if he fails is his life. Gamble, for his part, stumbles across said investment banker over some missing permits on a construction site he is backing and the pair of cops stumble into a situation that they do not understand at all.

The key to enjoying The Other Guys - and it is quite enjoyable despite its shortcomings - is this. Turn off your brain, don't even consider thinking big picture, and enjoy the individual moments. Because while the overall picture is pretty shoddy there are plenty of sparkling moments along the way. Mark Wahlberg makes for a solid comedic lead - no surprise to those who saw him in I Heart Huckabees - and his constant string of emasculating insults of Gamble - who apparently even urinates in a feminine way - is pretty damn funny. Eva Mendes is good for a laugh as Gamble's impossibly hot wife, and it's a pleasure to see Michael Keaton doing comedy again as the duo's paper pushing captain. And Steve Coogan even manages to be good for a laugh or two despite once again being stuck with a script that clearly doesn't understand what an immense talent he is. Writer-director Adam McKay peppers the script with enough solid one liners and sight gags that you never go too long without being handed a solid chuckle if not a full-on laugh. The end result is a film that, while being eminently forgettable and absolutely mediocre when looking back on it, makes for a pleasant enough diversion at the time.