Wahlberg and Ferrell - The Other Guys
The Other Guys has gotten more positive reviews than I expected it to get. I only read them after I saw the movie this past weekend. I expected to laugh, and I did quite a few times. However, I don’t think the movie was advertised properly–the trailers didn’t seem to know what the movie was really trying to be and after seeing it myself, the movie itself didn’t know either.
It was stupid, but in a good way. It seemed more like the movie should have been more strongly built as a type of “Naked Gun/Police Squad” movie but not quite as over the top. But as silly as some of the scenes were, the movie might have benefited going over the top some more. All the laughs came from the dialog and there wasn’t much to laugh at otherwise–not much physical humor. It seemed like they were trying to be really silly, but holding back and thinking, “Well, that would be just too silly.” For example, our comedy duo rush into a crime scene accidentally running over the corpse. What could have been a series of further slapstick mishaps, our other guys just sit in the car and talk about something else.
Speaking of the duo, there was a major problem here. There was no straight-man in this comedy team. I thought at first that Wahlberg’s character was the tough, cynical, beaten down cop who couldn’t get a break. Well, he was that, actually, but that would have been enough. No, he kept thinking every suspicious lead on a case was part of a drug crime–not a bad idea, but not Don Quixote enough. This just made the character stupid. On top of that, Ferrell’s character was a straight-laced nerdy naive goofball but then, they gave him this backstory that he used to be a pimp. So neither guy is really the goof, and neither is the straight-man–they just went back-and-forth with them. But they didn’t do it enough to go all “Dumb and Dumber” on the movie. They almost went there, and probably should have. Even the Captain, played by Michael Keaton, was just another stupid guy. Come to think of it, everyone was just plain stupid.
In the end, it all felt too reserved. One of the movie’s best moments was when they did go over the top. But it didn’t involve the main actors, but Dwayne Johnson (The Rock!) and Samuel L. Jackson making a fantastic cameo while pursuing criminals and jumping off a roof in a heroic dive only to end up splatted on the pavement–cut to a police funeral. Well played.
Still, I got buttered popcorn and laughed a lot. So in that sense, the movie delivered a good time. However, The Other Guys could have been great. In other words it was stupid, just not stupid enough.
Favorite line: Farrell tries to talk down a jumper using the megaphone from an ice cream truck and suddenly says, “Oh , he’s flying!”
"Oh, he's flying!"
