Cop Out a Boring Washout
After a bust goes horribly wrong leaving their informant dead and the suspect still on the loose veteran New York detectives Jimmy Monroe (Bruce Willis) and Paul Hodges (Tracy Morgan) are suspended a month without pay. This is especially bad for Monroe because the bill for his daughter Ava’s (Michelle Trachtenberg) wedding is coming due and there is now way in the world he can afford the $40,000 price tag without his paycheck.
Tracy Morgan, Seann William Scott and Bruce Willis in Warner Bros' Cop Out
That’s the setup for the Beverly Hills Cop meets Lethal Weapon style comedy Cop Out, and from that point forward things go from bad to worse to boring in the span of a nanosecond. Robb and Mark Cullen’s script concerns everything from Latino gangs taking over the streets of Brooklyn to enthusiastic parkour bandits ripping off sporting good stores, everything revolving around a stolen baseball Monroe will do just about anything to get back.
Problem is none of what happens is all that interesting or amusing, the plot so threadbare and contrived it doesn’t work as either an homage to 1980’s buddy cop films or a parody of that very same genre. The laughs are few and extremely far between, and while nothing presented here is ever outright horrible the whole thing is so humdrum working up any sort of enthusiasm for it is darn near impossible. No one involved seems to care a single lick about the film and as such neither did I, only forgotten electronic composer Harold Faltermeyer’s giddily self-reflective score worthy of any sort of praise.
You know there’s a problem when Willis would rather talk about the possibility of Die Hard 5 than discuss his involvement in this, or that director Kevin Smith (Zack and Miri Make a Porno) would spend more time Tweeting about his recent Southwest Airline misadventures than his experience working for Warner Bros. Not that I blame the either of them for their respective silence. Sometimes in Hollywood you just can’t put a pretty face on failure and the best thing to do is act like the darn thing never happened in the first place, filmmaker and star sticking to the old adage that if you don’t have anything nice to say it’s better to not say anything at all.
I do have to admit some of the bits between Willis and Morgan, the latter a comedian I have never quite understood the passionate popularity of, that are clearly improvised are a wee bit amusing. Even better is when Seann William Scott gets added to the mix, the actor so clearly unbridled and unhinged he makes every scene he’s in worth a slight chuckle they otherwise never would have gotten. These few and much too fare in-between moments cackle with the type of anarchic comedic irresponsibility Smith’s best works like Clerks, Dogma and Chasing Amy revel in, and it is only in these moments where the film stops being a chore and actually borders for brief spurts in becoming worthwhile.
Not that this ever happens. Robb and Mark’s script is wooden in the extreme, Smith completely unable to build any sort of comedic momentum out of it. Worse, the director stages his action scenes with all the skill of a six-year-old playing around with their father’s digital camera, and although Willis could probably stage a shoot-out in his sleep even he seems unable to give the violence his usual John McClane flair.
There’s not really anything else to say. Cop Out is a washout, plain and simple, and while I didn’t ever hate it to say I liked any of the film enough to give it even a partial recommendation would be an outright lie. It’s bad, and if ever a movie could have shot itself in the head in order to put the audience out of its collective misery than this is the one I truly wish could have actually done it.
Film Rating: ê1/2 (out of 4)
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