Film Review | The Other Guys

Yes, I know The Social Network – David Fincher and Alan Sorkin’s already box-office-bursting drama about the founding days of Facebook – is already out by the time you read this. And by all means, you should go see it: critics are often as bad judges of quality as herd-audiences are, but as was the case with Jonah Hex last week (only in inverse), it’s getting the kind of praise that’s difficult to explain away as just a matter of opinion.

However, sadly enough, it has arrived to our multiplexes only on Friday – not enough time for me to scribble away before deadline. So for now, we’ll have to content ourselves with some filler – perhaps (who knows?) you’re already having trouble booking for The Social Network… after all, Facebook is just as big here as anywhere else.

Just as (I imagine) most males in the audience, however, when looking for something to watch this week I operated on a very specific brief: avoid Eat Pray Love, Julia Roberts’s neo-hippie-cum-Sex-and-The-City-style-‘soul-searching’-exercise. It looks lush, uplifting and pretty, but corrupt on every other level: the kind of narcissistic indulgence masquerading as spiritual enlightenment makes me feel slightly sick. So instead I went with something I thought was bound to be inoffensive and fun. Will Ferrell usually does the trick in that area, and his buddy cop film with Mark Whalberg had a chuckle-worthy enough trailer. My expectations were more or less met… though it was still a case of simply being relieved for dodging the Julia Robert vehicle, rather than revelling in a genuinely enjoyable cinematic experience.

New York City detective Allen Gamble (Ferrell) is more comfortable pushing pencils than busting bad guys. A meticulous forensic accountant, his numbers are never off. Detective Terry Hoitz (Wahlberg) is Gamble’s reluctant partner. Try as Detective Hoitz might to get back on the streets, an embarrassing encounter with a famous baseball player has left a sizable black mark on his permanent record. Detectives Danson (Dwayne Johnson) and Highsmith (Samuel L. Jackson) are the complete opposites of Gamble and Hoitz: unwaveringly confident, they always get their man, and they do it with style to spare. But while pursuing a band of highly trained robbers, the super-detectives get too reckless for their own good… leaving a hole to be filled in their absence. A hole that Gamble and Hoitz, try as they might, don’t stand a chance of filling, but they go for it anyway, embarrassment and hilarity never too far behind their efforts.

Director Adam McKay was crucial to Will Ferrell’s ascent into superstardom. Also a graduate from the American TV staple comedy show Saturday Night Live, he helmed Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy and Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby, cementing Ferrell’s reputation for nailing painfully delusional gasbags that we feel no guilt for laughing at.

The fact that they have a healthy working relationship is made evident in The Other Guys, as it’s a comedy that rolls on with effortless, even childish abandon.

While you can predict the plot from the beginning to the very end (and despite some convoluted twisty-turniness towards the end), the joy is in the gags and – perhaps more importantly – in some hilariously memorable lines. At a meeting for cops with anger management problems that Hoitz is forced to attend, a sufferer explains how firing his gun with complete abandon made him feel like “a Viagra pill with a face.”

Hoitz and Gamble’s pseudo-banter also yields some gems: on one of their first encounters, Gamble counters an insult with such nerdy precision that you just have to stare back in bafflement, and Hoitz, the frustrated alpha male par excellance (“I’m a peacock, you gotta let me fly!”) comments that driving in Gamble’s Prius literally feels like “riding in a vagina.” Some sustained gags also work well: Gamble is convinced that his smoking hot wife Sheila (Eva Mendez) is in fact plain and an embarrassment, and the duo’s boss Captain Gene Mauch (Michael Keaton) unwittingly quotes lyrics from TLC. In the end, the film’s self-awareness is what saves it: we’re all in on it, so let’s just enjoy it, is the motto.

There is a fault in all the joyful madness, however. By the middle, the gags just keep flying at the audience, the plot taking a substantial cigarette break outside the madcap police chase romp that’s meant to be taking place. And by this point, you realise that maybe McKay and co. are just trying a little too hard to be funny.

It’s significant that McKay and Ferrell have founded and continue to be involved in the website Funny or Die – a user generated comedy video page – because the film’s structure (or lack of thereof) and the fact that it prioritises absurd, sometimes quite inspired, gags and catchphrases so clearly over plot recalls that format. This isn’t necessarily a drawback, however – who wants to see yet another funny buddy-cop film, especially after we’ve had one quite recently with Cop Out (admittedly, a complete failure)? What is sacrificed is any real tempo… so instead of being a delicious side-dish, the gags become the main course and after a while run the risk of hypnotising the audience into indifference.

But that’s precisely the thing: do you care? True, there are a lot of buddy cop spoofs out there… the monumental classic in this field – in recent memory at least – is Edgar Wright’s Hot Fuzz (which we could actually consider as a Brit equivalent of The Other Guys). As stop-gap entertainment it works well – the summer-autumn transition is never really smooth as far as cinema is concerned, and at least McKay’s film one of the least ugly casualties on the list.

 At least we can look forward to The Social Network next week. Beyond that, it’s nice to discover that the St James Cavalier Cinema is back on track… so us guys will have more options for shelter come next Julia Roberts/Sarah Jessica Parker deluge.