The Other Guys

Reviewed by Mike Kamrowski

This hasn't been the best summer for comedy films, so I was a bit weary about checking this one out. I thought it looked great when I watched the first trailers a few months back, but so did Dinner For Schmucks...

The Other Guys is your typical good-cop bad-cop film, except it isn't that at all. That might be what it set out to do, but in the end it is really just an extreme exaggeration of the genre and it worked perfectly.

The characters are what made this movie for me, from Will Ferrell's timid desk-jockey character of Allen Gamble, who wants nothing more than to finish his oh-so important paperwork to Mark Wahlberg's anxious, over-the-top hero-wannabe role as Terry Hoitz. Michael Keaton steps in to play the not so hardass police Captain who constantly wants to see the duo in his office, while Steve Coogan (Hamlet 2) plays the role of wealthy money man David Ershon.

And, in one of the most spectacular jobs of movie casting ever, Sam Jackson and Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson play the hot-shot lead detectives that the women love and the rest of the police force (mainly Wahlberg) envy. They are your typical rouge cop team, the type that the phrase "shoot first, ask questions later" was designed for. They are (not surprisingly) hilarious together during the short amount of screen-time they have, which is probably a good thing because Ferrell and Wahlberg would have spent the film in their shadow. The supporting cast works well in my opinion- the movie is clearly about Gamble and Hoitz. Rounding everything off is a ridiculously funny cameo by Derek Jeter and the voice of your humble narrator, Ice T.

The plot was very predictable, but the story was interesting. After the death of Samuel L. and The Rock, Wahlberg and Ferrell decide (although Ferrell was forced... at gunpoint) to fill the very big shoes of their idols and throw their hats in the ring for top cops. They discover a ponzi-type scheme being cheifed by Coogan and his thugs. Eventually the good guys win and blah-blah-blah. Very predictable, but like I said, the story wasn't really the drawing point.

Will Ferrell is on the money funny and Wahlberg is right there with him. In fact, everyone is funny in this movie. It's one of those movies where everything is genuine and the jokes keep coming in rapid succession. While some of them might be duds, other's will catch you off guard and the next thing you know the theater is rolling (the hobo orgy in Ferrell's car was one such moment).

When all is said and done (...or blown up, crashed, etc.) The Other Guys is an exaggeration of an exaggerated cop flick (Starsky & Hutch and Rush Hour come to mind) and is completely unapologetic about it. It mixes action with comedy -not the other way around- and does it with every trick in the book: physical humor, random gimmicks, hilarious one-liners (some that you might not even catch during the first viewing), ridiculous situations and the comedic styles of Will Ferrell and Mark Wahlberg play perfectly off of each other.

4 out of 5 stars

And if all of that isn't reason enough to go see The Other Guys, here's one more: Eva Mendes wearing low-cut shirts. Fantastic.