Cop Out

February 26, 2010

There’s a scene early in Cop Out—the second half of the first one, actually—that’ll tell you right away how you’re going to get along with the rest of it. Crazy (but apparently smart) detective Paul Hodges (Tracy Morgan) coerces his partner Jimmy Monroe (Bruce Willis) into letting him take the lead in the interrogation of a low-level flunky in a drug empire. Paul enters the room and proceeds to rip off lines from probably a dozen different movies while Jimmy, on the other side of the one-way glass, lists off what it is Paul is referencing. This is tedious enough by itself, but the staging—extreme close-ups on Morgan shticking intercut with shots of Willis listing off movie titles while looking off-camera, up against a blank brick wall—takes the tedious and sinks it into the realm of the inept. Cop Out never recovers.

The scene is curious for another reason: only it and one or two other jokes bear the distinct voice of Kevin Smith, who in Cop Out is directing his first movie written by someone else. I would call the rest of the film “rote,” but it does not even put that much work in; Cop Out assumes you have seen as many buddy-cop movies as its creators have, and allows that shared cultural knowledge to do most of the work.

In brief: Paul and Jimmy majorly botch an investigation into a drug ring operating in Brooklyn. They’re suspended for one month (complete with gun-and-badge turn-in) without pay, which sucks for Jimmy, who’s looking for a way to fund his daughter’s extravagant wedding. (It never occurs to him to tell his daughter that a $50,000 wedding may be somewhat exorbitant.) Paul thinks his wife is cheating on him. And when Jimmy tries to sell a rare baseball card to fund the wedding, he finds himself involved with the drug ring again. Which is certainly one way to have your B-plot loop back into your A-plot.

There’s also some business with a tweaker cat burglar (Seann William Scott) and some rival detectives (Kevin Pollak and Adam Brody), but they exist only to remind everyone how much funnier Cop Out should be.

And it should be. This is a jokey buddy-cop movie starring Tracy Morgan and Bruce Willis. Morgan’s made a name for himself doing exactly this kind of shtick on Saturday Night Live and 30 Rock, and Bruce Willis epitomizes the cop movie of the last 20 years. And though Smith has been trending downward since Chasing Amy, even the otherwise-abysmal Clerks 2 had some funny moments amid the dreadfully aimless scatology.

Some of the blame lies with writers Robb and Mark Cullen, no doubt, who together have a mostly unremarkable track record writing mostly unremarkable television. There is nothing special about this script, its people or its dialogue; it’s hard to imagine that anyone at any point in the film’s development process felt enthusiastic about it. The film’s tortured history—several roster changes both behind and in front of the camera—only further underlines its red-headed stepchild status. I can only assume it was finished on a dare, and that at no point in the film’s history did anyone give much of a damn about it.

And that raises the question: if you’re going to pick Kevin Smith to do one of the two things he does for your movie, why on God’s green earth would you want him to direct? Smith’s movies are infamous for being of the “point the camera at the talking people” school of directing; it was always the dialogue that kept his work afloat. But no, in Cop Out we have the funny writer directing and the unfunny guys writing. Whose idea of success was that? If only Cop Out had kept A Couple of Dicks as its title. That, at least, is clever.