The Other Guys: Critic Reviews

It's a comedy of manhood for the age of emasculation.

The Other Guys is most authentically itself when it indulges in a free-form but nonetheless highly disciplined silliness that has the effect of dissolving, rather than piquing, whatever worldly anger or frustration you may be harboring.

McKay and co-writer Dave Henchy keep on pumping out gags; their movie often looks like a 107-minute comedy sketch, and I laughed throughout.

What would have been very funny for 15 minutes, and pretty funny for 45, doesn't maintain the standard over the course of a feature-length film.

The Other Guys takes stuff that, as a rule, isn't particularly funny, and tries to make you laugh. More often than not, it succeeds.

What seems like another desperate adventure in stunt casting turns out to be a combustible comic bounty.

Somebody didn't pack enough comedy for this long trip -- the punchlines in the movie's second half are often callbacks to jokes you may not fondly remember from the first, until every gag is united with its mate.

There are as many hits as there are misses, thanks to the dedication of both leads.

A summer movie that honors summer-movie conventions with a vengeance.

Through it all, Ferrell is as Ferrell does. He's a non sequitur with frizz.

They may not be Jack Lemmon and Billy Wilder , but Will Ferrell and Adam McKay have a pretty good thing going.

At times, there's an "everything but the kitchen sink" quality to the joke grab. But it works.

Highbrow, lowbrow and no-brow, inspired by improvisation yet connected to the structure of a plot and the traditions of a genre, "The Other Guys" is that rare modern comedy as smart as it is crazy, and as skillful as it is silly.

As with the war-film goof Tropic Thunder, you wonder if a smaller, scruffier-looking version of the same movie would have yielded bigger comic payoffs.

This is the fourth feature that Will Ferrell and writer-director Adam McKay have collaborated on, and once again they deliver laugh-out-loud if ultimately disposable comedy with mixed messages about arrested male development.

The Other Guys boasts perhaps three legitimately funny sequences in all its belabored 107 minutes.

Do we really need another buddy-cop comedy? While stupefying, the answer is, surprisingly, "yes."

In terms of flat-out nonstop laughter, it's the best comedy of the summer.

It's sneaky and smartly funny, offering an almost perfect balance of action and comedy.

The laughs ultimately take a backseat to a convoluted white-collar crime story.

Forgets it's a comedy and starts burrowing into a convoluted but uninteresting financial scandal involving an evil capitalist played by Steve Coogan.

The Other Guys is a Ponzi scheme of a comedy, a buddy action picture cluttered with funny characters and hilarious moments.

Dead horse, meet floggers.

Deteriorates into something resembling Rush Hour 3.

This is a startling late-summer surprise that's hysterically funny when it's not falling on its face.