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Sunday, April 28, 2024
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HOLLYWOOD COP OUT
EDITOR'S PICK
`Cop Out` - good for giggles, not for laughs (IANS Movie Review)
Rating: **
There’s a right way of making comedies. There’s a wrong way of doing
comedies. Then, there’s a Kevin Smith way of directing an uproarious comedy.
Or you can say, ‘there was’ if you consider his latest offering "Cop
Out".
Jimmy (Bruce Willis) and Paul (Tracy Morgan) work as colleagues in New York
Police Department for nine years. Their work is slightly off the books. When
their plan to bust a drug cartel backfires, they are suspended without pay for a
month.
Bad time for Jimmy whose daughter is to be married. Jimmy’s wife’s current
husband taunts him on his inability to raise fund for his daughter’s marriage.
This is too much for a proud Jimmy to take. So he does what every self
respecting man should do - he decides to sell a rare and precious baseball card
he had preserved for decades. Sadly, when he is at it, he gets burgled.
Left with no option Jimmy and Paul track down the thief, only to discover that
he has sold it to the same drug-lord whose case had led to their suspension.
They put their heads into the lion’s mouth and the drug-lord asks them to
retrieve a stolen Mercedes in exchange for the baseball card.
On the way, they save a beautiful Latino girl, are chased by cars through a
graveyard, discover that Paul’s wife is having an affair, get kicked by a 10
year old car thief and more… But does Jimmy get the card in the end?
For those who know, the name Kevin Smith would have been enough to make one pay
a visit to the theatre. Yet, for a man behind offbeat but hilarious comedies
like "Clerks", "Mallrats", "Clerks II" etc, this
one surely seems like a "copout".
Gone are the ridiculously hilarious dialogues and situations, characters that
live on the fringes of society and proudly so, the awkward comic timing and
dialogue delivery of his characters and the vulgar but innocent and funny lines.
Kevin Smith was the king, indeed a pioneer of low budget independent American
comedies. Sadly, his foray into mainstream leaves you nothing to rave about.
Indeed, everything in ‘Cop Out’ belongs to the mainstream - the characters
and their lives, the plot, the story, the dialogues and the city. This is Kevin
Smith at his worst.
Bruce Willis is decent. Tracy Morgan is good, and this will surely be his break
out movie from TV into the power corridors of Hollywood.
The basic plot - of black cop and white cop - though clichéd seems perfect for
a knockout comedy. The direction isn’t bad either. Perhaps the fault is with
the writers Robb Cullen and Mark Cullen for not living up to an otherwise decent
build up of plot. Maybe the migration from TV writing to film writing did them
in.
There are enough giggles in the film to keep you going. But not an ounce of the
foot-tapping laughter you expect from Kevin Smith’s films.
Directed by Kevin Smith (“Zack and Miri Make a Porno”), “Cop Out” features two longtime NYPD partners on the trail of a stolen, rare, mint-condition baseball card who find themselves up against a merciless, memorabilia-obsessed gangster. Jimmy (Bruce Willis) is the veteran detective whose missing collectible is his only hope to pay for his daughter’s upcoming wedding, and Paul (Tracy Morgan) is his “partner-against-crime” whose preoccupation with his wife’s alleged infidelity makes it hard for him to keep his eye on the ball.
Warner Bros. Pictures presents, A Marc Platt Production,“Cop Out,” to be distributed worldwide by Warner Bros. Pictures, a Warner Bros. Entertainment Company.
