Cop Out: Review By moviegeek

If Bad Boys and 48 Hours were to have offspring, the youngest and most immature of their children would be the recent comedy Cop Out. Tired and desperate, the film gets its laughs not from the material, but from the improv of its actors. Bruce Willis does his best and Tracy Morgan talks a lot trying to salvage this film, but they instead end up highlighting their poor chemistry.

New York police detective Jimmy (Willis) teams up with his partner, Paul (Morgan), after his treasured baseball card is stolen-a card that was worth thousands of dollars going towards paying off his daughter's wedding. On their mission, they work their way through a galore of action sequences and comical breaks.

Tracy Morgan talks TOO much in Cop Out. I've never found him to be funny, and in this movie he only reassured me that I was right. On the other hand, Bruce Willis fits well in this role. He has a perfect deadpan and adds the perfect amount of masculinity to the picture. Seann William Scott also gets a few laughs in a cameo as a small-time crook.

Cop Out has a couple of hilarious sequences, but the comedy never blends with the action. The film practically has to come to a dead halt before the characters really can be funny. There is so much at stake in the action and it is played up so heavily, that all of the funny comments throw the movie off beat. Cop Out has no consistency or fluidity to its movement.

One of the largest problems with the movie is how tedious and stale the material is. We have seen it dozens of other times, each time increasingly worse. There was Beverly Hills Cop (which I still don't find funny) and then a slew of buddy cop films (48 Hrs., Tango & Cash, Bad Boys (II), Rush Hour (2, 3), Miami Vice, Seven, Rising Sun, Men in Black (II), Showtime, Shanghai Noon (Knights), National Security, Lethal Weapon (1, 2, 3, 4, gasp), Dragnet, The Last Boy Scout, I Spy, Hollywood Homicide, Hot Fuzz, and only six months after this film came out, The Other Guys). I'm sure I missed dozens of others, but now you can see the trouble in making a film of this sort. There HAS to be something fresh in a stale premise. And Cop Out just goes through the motions. We get scene after dreary scene of obligatory moments.

Cop Out isn't a bad film. It's simply a VERY "not good" picture. It's routine and only mildly and sporadically funny. It falls into the third, and most common, deadly sin of moviemaking: "been there, done that". Now it's important to note that this sin hints at what is actually the WORST of all things that a film can be: boring. Cop Out very nearly fell into that unresponsive tedium. When a film ceases to make you react, then it truly has lost all sense of the art of cinema. Cop Out is a forgettable film, but, at very least, it wasn't quite boring.

Other Sinners: Too many to list (as I mentioned, this is the most common fault); All of the cop movies above that happened to suck (not all of them did, mind you).