Big Picture Big Sound

Clown and "Out"

Tracy Jordan - the character played by Tracy Morgan on TV's "30 Rock" - sums up his show-business success by confiding to his wife: "we're lucky people laugh when I say things". Judging by his performance in "Cop Out" - director Kevin Smith's dud of a buddy movie - Mr. Morgan seems to be hoping the same can be said about his career. The opening (interminable) minutes of the film feature Mr. Morgan's detective Paul Hodges interrogating a suspect by screaming quotes from other (far, far superior) movies at him. The moment is meant to be hilarious in a he-so-crazy sort of way, but it ends up being noisy and - worse - not at all funny.

Hodges and his long-time partner Jimmy Monroe (Bruce Willis) actually do manage to get information out of their suspect and it leads to a botched sting operation that ends with an informant dead and a murderer going free. In a typical trope of the genre, the next scene has Hodges and Monroe being chewed out by their Captain. Now, you may have noticed, "Cop Out" runs down the standard checklist of the buddy cop genre. The problem is, it goes wrong every step of the way. Aside from that cacophonous interrogation scene, the botched sting goes wrong simply because our two heroes are terrible cops. So, when the Captain chews them out, the Captain is actually in the right. Traditionally, the audience should be outraged at our heroes getting suspended. I was just happy to have them off the streets.

But this is just the beginning. Being suspended from work causes problems for Monroe because his daughter's about to get married and, somehow, losing those four weeks' salary are going to cause him to be unable to pay for the wedding. Since the film makes a point of the fact that the wedding costs $48,000, I'd be interested to see Monroe's paycheck.

In an effort to raise cash, Monroe decides to pawn a beloved baseball card, which leads to a very coincidental robbery, which leads right back to the original murderer and some offensively cliché Mexican gangs, led by the least threatening villain I've seen in recent memory (Guillermo Díaz). Along the way, Hodges and Monroe bicker half-heartedly and jokes land with a thud. I'd blame the script, by Robb Cullen and Mark Cullen, but many of the scenes are obviously ad-libbed. Though ad-libbing is another technique employed by 80s cops movies (notably the "Lethal Weapon" series), here it leads to annoying simultaneous talking and, ugh, knock-knock jokes. Those weren't even funny in the 80s.

Some supporting characters land a few laughs - Seann William Scott, as the Joe Pesci of the film, and particularly Susie Essman from "Curb Your Enthusiasm" - but the film belongs to its two leads. Mr. Morgan is indeed funny on "30 Rock", but there he's got some of the best writers on television supporting him. Here, not. Bruce Willis does his best to wring some emotion from his subplot, but there's nothing there. Even his rivalry with a slimy step-father (Jason Lee) never pays off.

So tone-deaf is the film that it's hard to believe pop culture maestro Kevin Smith directed it. Even the editing (also by Mr. Smith) feels out of pace. Perhaps it would have been better if he'd taken a crack at the script. The one truly brilliant touch is bringing in 80s-synth mainstay Harold Faltermeyer to do original music.

The buddy movie genre is as old as movies themselves. It can be traced from the Laurel & Hardy and Abbott & Costello romps through the Hope-Crosby and Martin & Lewis films right down to the veritable glut of 80s cop movies this film hopes to exemplify. "Cop Out" aims squarely at the Nick Nolte-Eddie Murphy classic "48 hrs", but the most this film has in common with that one is that "Cop Out" feels about that long.