Cop Out User Reviews

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  As part of my job working at a movie rental store, I need to have a working knowledge of our new releases so that I can recommend them to customers.  Yesterday was Losers.  Tomorrow will be Greenberg.  But today was Cop Out.   
 
Sometimes, I hate my fucking job. 
 
Today's "I'd Rather Accidently Drop the N-Word In Front of Terry Crews" movie is Kevin Smith's first feature that wasn't written by him.  Now, I think Smith can usually be a funny guy.  His work, though it may rely too heavily on pop culture references and recycled jokes, has more than a little bit of charm and is usually a lot of fun to watch.  Cop Out proves that a movie needs more than a talented director at the helm.  With its stale jokes and absolutely shit script, Cop Out is a massive blunder for everyone involved.   
  
The plot of Cop Out revolves around partners of nine years, Jimmy (Bruce Willis) and Paul (Tracy Morgan).  Jimmy is divorced, and he wants to pay for his daughter's upcoming wedding.  However, he gets suspended for a blunder on a case and decides to sell his prized baseball card for the money to pay for the wedding.  Before he can do this, the card gets stolen by an annoying delinquent named Dave (Seann William Scott).  There's also some weak filler involving a drug cartel, but it hardly matters to the story at all.  It's like there were two movie plots smushed together to see if it would work.  Unfortunately,  if ifs and buts were candy and nuts, we'd all have a merry Christmas, and there is very little that is merry about this movie.
 
I laughed at exactly four things in Cop Out.  To spare you the pain of having to suffer through the whole movie to see them, I will illustrate them here: 
 
1. In the beginning of the film, Paul is interrogating his victim, screaming lines from classic cop films, as Jimmy recites the title of the film Paul is aping.  But when Paul screams "yippie-kay-yay motherfucker!" Jimmy claims he "hasn't even seen that film".  It was a clever homage to Die Hard, which Willis of course starred in.  

2. Dave, several times through the movie, will follow along with somebody's words and say exactly what they say as they say it.  This was actually pretty funny the first couple of times.   
 
 3. Paul, for some reason, starts talking about taking a shit.  This was stupid, until he said his "shits are so big that his neighbors say 'Waaaaariors...come out and plaaaaayy...."  This was funny, again because of the reference. 
 
4. The scene from the trailer, when Paul is eating chips while the woman is trying to explain her plight.  I eat corn nuts a lot, and every time I do at least one person gives me shit for them being so crunchy and loud.  So it was a somewhat personal moment of relation, which was amusing. Also, the looks Jimmy throws Paul are priceless.
 
          The rest of the movie, which lasts almost two hours, is littered with painful one-liners and attempts at buddy comedy cleverness that wallows in vulgarity while almost never hitting its mark.  Those four things I found amusing, combined, comprise maybe one or two minutes of the movie's two hour running time (approximately).  That's almost  and hour and fifty minutes that I sat watching the movie, wishing something funny was going to happen.  It's 108 minutes of useless gang subplot filler, Scott being a jackass, Morgan screaming a lot, and Willis being stony faced.  He honestly looks bored out of his mind throughout the movie and I can't imagine what compelled him to sign on for this.  It's not that I don't like stupid humor; I saw a poster once with Gandhi's face, along with a quote that read "Bitches ain't shit but hos and tricks."  I chuckled for a good 5 minutes at that poster.  It was a fucking stupid poster, but it was clever.  The problem with Cop Out is the botched script and execution of the jokes.  And a lack of cleverness.
 
The movie was originally going to be called A Couple of Dicks, which I actually think is pretty ingenious, and a much better title than what it got changed to.
 
I can respect that the screenwriters were attempting to fashion an homage to 80s buddy cop films, and it seems that their hearts are in the right place, but it's just handled so poorly that it comes off messy.  It's really too bad, because Bruce Willis has shown that he is really good with dry humor in films like The Whole Nine Yards, and Tracy Morgan, of 30 Rock fame, is a talented comedian.  Something just got lost in translation and the movie ends up feeling lifeless, forced, and almost completely devoid of any enjoyment.