The Other Guys

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Aug 102010
 

With the comedy sorely lacking this summer, we all needed The Other Guys pretty badly.  Dinner For Schmucks, was funny and did get unnecessarily blasted but after seeing director Adam McKay’s return to the format over the weekend, Jay Roach’s movie was clearly just an appetizer.  McKay is now without a doubt, the best, purest comedy writer and director currently working in film.  When you couple him with longtime collaborator Will Ferrell, you instantly have comedy gold.  Ferrell has endured a lot of backlash in recent years, mainly due to overexposure, but when he teams with McKay it really does bring out the best version of him.

The Other Guys is at its core a pretty simple buddy cop flick with a little bit of a twist.  Instead of focusing on two superhuman cops out to bust a drug kingpin, it instead focuses on a couple of hapless dumbasses that are just background noise.   Officers Allen Gamble (Ferrell) and Terry Hoitz (Mark Wahlberg) are stuck doing the paperwork most of the time for the pair of badass cops that go out and haul in the bad guys.  The supercops in this case would be Highsmith (Samuel L. Jackson) and Danson (Dwayne Johnson) who are absolutely hilarious caricatures of two wreckless cops.  Their shit does not stink and it doesn’t matter how many lives are endangered or how much property is damaged – all just to bust a couple of idiots for a quarter ounce of marijuana.

Terry Hoitz is a former up and comer in the department who has his development as a badass severely stunted due to an incident at Yankee Stadium that I won’t give away.  Now he’s stuck as one of the ‘other guys’ but he desperately wants back in the action.  Unfortunately his partner Allen,  thanks to a hilariously outlined sketchy past,  is content with sitting at his desk, filing paperwork and getting home safe to his inexplicably hot wife Sheila played by Eva Mendes.  I’ll tread lightly on spoilers here, but let’s say that there is an ‘opening’ in the supercop area of the department, and Terry is eager to push Allen into fulfilling that role.  Rather than abuse the age old drug format in buddy cop movies of old, the plot heaves forward surrounding a financial scandal, a bigwig wall-street type in Steve Coogan’s David Ershon character, and a lot of referencing accounting mishaps.  It’s quite refreshing and modern actually, and you can tell that Adam McKay is really saying something to his audience here.  It’s clear he feels pretty strongly about the country’s current economic situation.  Fear not though, it’s not heavy handed or contrived; it’s all fun and works.

So what’s funny in The Other Guys?  Just about everything, and my head definitely was in pain as were my sides after seeing this.   Ferrell is on fire here playing opposite of the know-it-all idiot he’s grown accustomed to playing.  I think he’s funnier when he’s playing the straight man, and he does so here, with a twisted back-story that will have you rolling.  Wahlberg has garnered a little bit of hate for being a bit one-note in this movie, but I found him really funny.  The two of these guys play off of each other well, and it’s a pairing that I wouldn’t have figured would turn out as hilarious as it did.  Wahlberg’s character has some seriously silly masculinity issues and it’s all played up perfectly by McKay.  The gags are frequent, and McKay gives you just enough time in between them to recover and reset before the next one comes along and destroys you all over again.  I’d love to go into detailed examples but again, I just can’t give that shit away.

There are some serviceable turns in the bit character department.  Rob Riggle is solid as always, Sam Jackson and The Rock are also perfect for what they do in the brief amount of time they’re in the film.  Who I really wanted to talk about for a second though, is Michael Keaton as the police Captain.  I know what we were all thinking when we saw him briefly in the trailer and it probably went something like this, “Holy SHIT Keaton is in this???  YES!”.  Am I close?  I thought so.  Michael Keaton steals every scene he’s in, which considering the comedic company he’s keeping in this movie is no easy task.  The main running gag involving him quoting TLC lyrics absolutely killed me every time.  I’m a big fan of absurdist comedy, which McKay does so well, and this movie never failed to disappoint on that level.

While the absurdist content wasn’t quite as heavily poured on as it was in Step Brothers (which is criminally underrated) it’s still evident throughout.  There are plenty of out-of-nowhere lines and bits going on to keep fans of the absurd happy.  One in particular involving references to a group of homeless men having an orgy in Allen’s poor Prius (which is horribly abused throughout the movie) had me in a fit, and also shows just how far they pushed this movie in terms of its rating.  At no time during the film did I think to myself, “This should’ve been rated R.”.  It never even occurred to me that it wasn’t an R-rated comedy during the running time.

Go see this.  Even if you’re not much of a Will Ferrell fan, you’re going to find something you like here.  There’s so much packed into every frame of this movie you won’t be disappointed with it.  It’s always nice to see Adam McKay return to the screen because they really have to try hard to fuck anything up.  While it may not be on the level of Anchorman, it’s certainly worth your time and is bugnuts crazy, absurd and flat-out funny as shit.

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  • http://www.mediabreach.com Dustin

    I desperately want to see this. I might just do so on Friday night.

   
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