I get why buddy
cop movies usually have one character who’s goofy or messed up and the other
who’s serious and well-put-together—it creates balance. But when both
characters are equally jacked up in their silliness, the movie spirals out of
control.
This movie
didn’t do well at the box office, though critics seemed to like it—which I
don’t understand. It lacked the kind of comedy that would make you want to
re-watch it, which is probably why it flopped. On top of that, it ended in a
way that screamed overconfidence, as if the producers thought they were
launching a franchise. Thankfully, that didn’t happen.
The movie is
supposed to be a spoof of buddy cop films, but it overdoes it with explosions
and gunfire to the point of redundancy. The action scenes felt completely
unnecessary.
The story
revolves around two partners who should never have been paired together, on
screen or otherwise. Whoever thought Will Ferrell and Mark Wahlberg would make
a great duo on screen needs to answer one question: why?
The plot centers
on two cops living in the shadow of another duo whose oversized egos literally
got them killed. With that duo out of the picture, there’s room for a new top
team in the police force. Allen (Ferrell) and Terry (Wahlberg) want to be that
team—well, mostly Terry. Allen is content to stay at his desk, but Terry drags
him along.
They investigate
what seems to be a simple burglary at a jewelry shop, which leads to the arrest
of a man who, as we saw earlier, owes $32 billion. Instead of focusing on the
bigger crime, Allen arrests the man for building permit violations. Things go downhill
fast when they’re ambushed, losing their prisoner, their guns, their car, and
even their shoes.
This infuriates
Terry. Despite orders from their boss to drop the case, he insists on dragging
Allen deeper into the investigation. They dig too deep, causing chaos around
them and landing themselves in the middle of a much bigger mess.
Some movies are
just too long and incoherent to matter, and The Other Guys is one of
them. It prioritizes action over sense and gets so caught up in its silliness
that it loses any semblance of cohesion. At times, it feels like two separate
stories: one about a mismatched pair of buddy cops trying to work together, and
another about a bizarre financial crime. When the two stories finally converge,
the film briefly starts to make sense—only for other cops who previously seemed
indifferent to suddenly show up and end the movie.
The ending had
me throwing my hands up, wondering what kind of nonsense I had just endured in
the name of entertainment.
Ferrell’s
character, Allen, is exactly what you’d expect: weird, overly absorbed in his
own little world, and too clueless to understand how reality works. Strangely,
hot women are drawn to him. Meanwhile, Wahlberg’s character, Terry, is supposed
to be the "stable" one in the typical buddy cop formula, but he’s so
dysfunctional in his own right that I’m sure entire books could be written
about his issues. Where people found the humor to rate this movie positively is
beyond me.
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