How much you enjoy "Cop Out" is ultimately going to depend on your expectations for the movie and if you "get" what director Kevin Smith is trying to do. Smith lovingly satirizes the ‘80s cop-buddy formula using the usual tough-guy actor (Bruce Willis) and comedian (Tracy Morgan) pairing. If you think the movie is playing it completely straight, you obviously don’t "get" it. "Cop Out" taps into the forgotten art of the "Lethal Weapon" and "Beverly Hills Cop" pictures, of being funny and being serious. Smith creates an entertaining flashback action movie wrapped around a semi-serious tone. While this is a tough balance, the filmmaker behind "Clerks" and "Chasing Amy" manages to make it work.
Willis and Morgan have a surprisingly good chemistry as two cops who "play by their own rules." Instead of being constantly at each other’s throats, Jimmy (Willis) and Paul (Morgan) compliment and stand up for each other. They prove during the course of the film what a partnership is all about, with each looking to protect the other. Jimmy’s daughter is grown-up and getting married. After Jimmy and Paul’s last departmental screw-up, they are placed on unpaid suspension, thereby causing the problem of how Dad will pay for the wedding. Jimmy decides to sell his most valuable possession, but it’s inadvertently taken during a botched robbery. Jimmy and Paul need to track down the crook and retrieve Jimmy’s pay day, while not getting themselves killed by drug dealers and thugs in the process.
While not all of the humor sticks, the good-natured demeanors of Willis and Morgan allow for most of the misses to be forgiven. After all, how can you not like these guys? The inclusion of Seann William Scott as another smart-aleck does become one goofball too many, but his presence is mercifully brief. Jimmy and Paul’s cop colleagues and adversaries, Hunsacker and Mangold, are played with the appropriate amount of obnoxiousness by veterans Kevin Pollock and newbie Adam Brody. While audiences have seen many of these plot points and characters before in other movies, Smith manages to give everything a fresh enough spin to make it watchable. Under a lesser director without the appropriate talent, this could have been a real bomb. Instead, "Cop Out" is a guilty pleasure throwback to a simpler cinematic time.
Rated R for pervasive language including sexual references, violence and brief sexuality.
