A Couple of Dicks

From A Couple of Dicks, to A Couple of Cops, to Cop Out, the title is the LEAST of this film's problems.

Cop Out

starring Bruce Willis, Tracy Morgan, Kevin Pollak, Guillermo Diaz, Michelle Trachtenberg, Jason Lee, Seann William Scott, Rashida Jones, Ana de la Reguera

directed by Kevin Smith

I never thought it would happen, but this is Kevin Smith’s first job as a director of a film that he did not write. The film is in fact written by the Cullen Brothers, who are the creators of TV’s Manchild. Smith is best known for his Jersey based comedy films Clerks, Chasing Amy, and more recently, Zack and Miri Make A Porno. Cop Out is Smith’s stab at something new; something a bit different from what he’s done in the past. He has proclaimed on his Twitter account that the film is a start in a new direction and redefining of himself. He describes Cop Out as somewhere inbetween Fletch and Lethal Weapon. Essentially it is his version, his parody even, of the buddy cop film genre.

Jimmy Monroe (Willis) and Paul Hodges (Morgan) have been partners for the better part of a decade. They are as close as brothers, and act a lot like it too; they bicker and argue back and forth constantly yet manage to always get the job done. Stuff may get shot up in the process, but they are good detectives. Jimmy’s daughter Ava (Trachtenberg) is getting married, and Jimmy wants to pay for the wedding. The only problem is that he lives on a policeman’s salary, and Ava wants a $48,000 ceremony. Jimmy decides the only way he can get the money is to sell his coveted, mint condition, prized possession: a rare 1950s baseball card. However, the card getsstolen. Jimmy and Paul follow the trail, and it leads them straight into the path of Poh Boy (Diaz), a gangster with plans for international drug trade. Taking down Poh Boy is just a part of the day in the life of the job, but the only thing Jimmy is concerned about is getting his baseball card back.

This movie is horribly disappointing. Do not go in expecting a typical Kevin Smith movie, because it is anything but. Don’t get me wrong; you can see Kevin’s fingerprints all over it. He acts as the editor as well as the director, and his infamous ‘no-style’ filming style is dead on what you would expect. Nothing flashy, nothing fancy; just a plainly shot film. But I think that in itself hurt the film. None of the action scenes popped, and there isn’t much of a forward momentum. Both are key elements to a good action flick, and action is just something that Kevin Smith’s style is not fitted for. But, again, he did exactly what you would expect of him, and you can’t fault him for that.

I fault the Cullen Brothers and their horrible writing. The dialogue sucks. There no real connection between characters, but what bothered me most is the forced cursing. There’s a difference between using curse words in a manner in which they make sense and have purpose, and using curse words at complete random for nothing more than an R rating. When you wince at a curse word and it doesn’t feel natural, there’s a problem. The film is littered with examples of this. The story sucked. The story line about the baseball card has almost nothing to do with the gangster story line; both could have existed independently. Instead, the film feels like two ideas are melded together for no good reason other than filler and forced jokes. Its as if the Cullen Brothers took a couple of good one liner dick jokes and school yard pranks and tried to string them together into a bad, delusional and skewed version of a cop movie. It is just that bad.

Example of how bad the writing is: Sean William Scott’s m.o. throughout is to just repeat what people say. Its funny the first time, then it just gets old. Tracy Morgan thinks his wife is cheating behind his back. Again, it gets a chuckle at first, but half of his jokes come right back to infidelity. Its this kind of one note, un-diverse story creation that bogs the film down all the way through.

The cast is one of the strangest line ups I’ve seen in some time. Read the cast list by itself; you’ll find yourself saying that there is no way any of these people have any kind of chemstry together. You’d be absolutely right. The two main characters should feel like they are attached at the hip, feeding off one another’s lines. Instead, Bruce Willis and Tracy Morgan trade barbs with not one bit of charima, and no connection whatsoever. Their buddy cop partnership falls completely flat. Sean William Scott has a few funny scenes, and Tracy Morgan did more than a few laugh out loud ad-libs. And it must be said that Ana de la Reguera is a wonderful actress and had no business slumming for this movie. But overall, not even the actors and actresses felt like they wanted to be a part of the flick. There is just no energy among the characters on the screen, and it makes the viewing painful.

You’ll get some laughs. You’ll get some of the jokes. You may even see the value of the parody aspect of Cop Out. However, the film sadly and completely misses the mark. Be warned; the preview shows about eighty percent of the best parts of the film. In my personal opinion, the film could have been so much more if it had actually been rewritten by Smith. I’m stunned that he chose this script to be his first directorial without his own script. He does what he can and what you’d expect in the director’s chair, but a bad script is a bad script, and bad casting is bad casting. You simply can’t polish a piece of crap into a pearl.