On paper, it's a great movie. And the previews do nothing to dispel that idea. Wahlberg is a perfect short-tempered cop (remember his turn in The Departed?) and Ferrell can play a by-the-book innocent (see Stranger Than Fiction) as a seemingly ideal foil. The great fun in the previews is our sense of recognition; when the cops encounter an explosion, they're not running away from it, jaws clenched and unflinching. Instead they're thrown back, and they writhe around on the ground complaining about blood blisters and soft tissue damage. The two hotshot cops in the movie (Dwayne Johnson and Samuel L. Jackson), in an insane chase scene, are called to account for incurring $12 million in damages on a misdemeanor arrest.
Given the previews, what I expected was an unconventional buddy comedy stemming from the disparity between action movie cliches and how an action movie would play out in real life, with unmistakably mortal heroes, even schlubs.
That wasn't exactly what I got.
Instead of a cliche turned on its head, I got, well, a typical Will Ferrell comedy. To be clear, I like Will Ferrell. He has a gift for spinning lunatic rants into comedic gold that you can't help but quote. (Example: probably my favorite bit in the movie was a long and clearly improvised rant of Ferrell's involving a lion and a tuna). And I like Mark Wahlberg. They have good chemistry. And the awesome (and underused) Michael Keaton had one of the funnier running jokes in the movie, even though it made zero sense.
But for the most part this film just didn't do it for me. It felt as though it had been hastily thrown together, with a criminal plot ripped from the headlines ... of two years ago. The running jokes seemed completely random and absurd, which didn't fit with the ostensible tone of the movie -- this was no Anchorman. There was plenty of stale teenage-boy humor (laughing at vaginas, sex, gay sex, old person sex, farts, etcetera), which I admit I have little patience for unless it's brilliant. The women in the movie were completely shoehorned in (mostly to service one of the absurd running jokes). And there was one character who seemed to be a ripoff of the much funnier Gary Cole character in Office Space.
Here's how I think The Other Guys could have lived up to the previews:
1) Sticking to realism. Aside from the explosion scene and the hotshot cops' car wreck featured in the previews, the action sequences in the movie were just as ridiculous as anything you'd see in a straightforward shoot 'em up. I think the movie would have been much funnier if we'd seen more real world consequences for the heroes: the Prius getting stuck in the midst of a car chase, or losing battery charge; Ferrell or Wahlberg getting hit during one of the huge shootouts in which automatic weapons are firing every which way; actual office work proving surprisingly to save the day. Those are the real unexpected elements that I have total faith Wahlberg and Ferrell could have rocked.
2) Fleshing out the funny throwaway jokes. There were some jokes in the movie that could have developed into something even better had they been built up; the wannabe hotshots taking a kid along on a car chase, for instance, or the idea that the supposed supercops were actually idiots. And Michael Keaton's character moonlighting in retail was something I expected to get a bigger punch line out of, and I think it could have been a lot better-handled. Finally, there was one scene with interesting visual effects that I think could have been applied more widely to enhance more of the montages in the movie.
3) Improvising more. Ferrell is known for his ability to ad-lib, and there were a few scenes in the movie where that was evident. But the rest of the cast seemed less comfortable in that mode, unlike in some of Ferrell's other work (Talladega Nights was either chock-full of great improv comedians or had a much better script, for instance, and Anchorman seems to be about 80% improv by a crazy-talented group of ad-libbers). The script itself felt pretty flat, and Ferrell seemed like an anomaly -- like someone going unexpectedly off-script -- instead of the wonderfully absurd movie-set Pied Piper he can be.
4) Ditching the dreck. Ferrell's strange female magnetism is a running joke that fell flat (at least to me) in almost every occurrence. Eva Mendes is pretty, but she's not funny -- or at least she's not allowed to be funny. There's no real call for her storyline; in fact I think they could have kept the idea (women find Ferrell strangely attractive) and used it to better effect in brief vignettes rather than drawn-out scenes. And the backstory for the criminal element seemed both to drag on and to fall short in terms of plot; I didn't find myself caring at all about the ostensible story. I wouldn't cut it out entirely, but I think it could have used more ruthless editing. That goes for the movie overall, actually. Perhaps my tolerance for absurd, juvenile humor (which I CAN and DO appreciate, thank you very much, at certain times) was just too fragile to last two hours.
In any case, I'd like to see Wahlberg and Ferrell pair up again -- perhaps with a larger supporting group of improv actors, and definitely with better screenwriters and editors. They do have chemistry, and I think The Other Guys had the making of a very good comedy. Unfortunately, like its heroes, this movie is just not the badass it wants to be.
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