The Other Guys

Review by Loc

You know what you get by now when you’re dealing with a Will Farrell vehicle. You get decidedly low-brow humor, sometimes it hits and sometimes it doesn’t. You get moments of complete insanity that make absolutely no sense, and those sometimes work and sometimes don’t. The biggest variable is the Will Farrell meter and whether he decides to crank it to 10 or leave it at 1. Most times, he’s straddling a very solid 7 that notches up to 8 or 9 when he starts yelling. Well, this flick has all the prerequisites, which may work, or it may not. Quick hit: mostly not.

The Other Guys is the Will Farrell take on buddy cop flicks. Whereas you have the original Lethal Weapon series as the measuring stick, The Other Guys steps in as the dipstick. Yes, satirizing this tired genre could be a hilarious romp, but this film is not that romp. Instead, it’s an extra-long Saturday Night Live skit with Farrell doing his thing and Mark Wahlberg doing his own shtick as well. Normally, ” an extra-long SNL skit” isn’t a good thing, but this time it barely works. It doesn’t happen often, and throughout this flick you can feel the suck bursting at the seams, but someone this film never fully unravels and maintains a sense of mediocrity. That’s not a ringing endorsement, but at least it doesn’t make your eyes bleed.

The “off” parts focus around the weirdness of Will Farrell’s character. At first, he’s the bookworm nerd on the police force, a paper-jockey and proud of it. As Wahlberg’s man of action is saddled with Farrell, their inaction leads to random, unconvincing yelling that’s supposed to be funny. But really, Wahlberg’s straight-man act is about as convincing as…any other Wahlberg act, and Farrell’s caustic outbursts have been seen before. There’s not much funny here, but there is a lot of waiting to get to the next scene.

Then Farrell decides to throw a wrench in the clichés and makes his character into something more. First he has the hottest wife in the film, played by a doting Eva Mendez. Second, he talks down to her in a “everyone sees you’re too hot for me except you and I” way, which again is supposed to be funny but is just not. Third, we see more outbursts from Farrell as he reveals his questionable past as a unwitting pimp in college. If there’s any part of this film that screams SNL skit it’s the character that seems unassuming then unleashes an expletive-ridden tirade followed by complete calmness. Welcome to 90 minutes of this movie!

There are other random characters, like Michael Keaton’s TLC-quoting police boss. There are other clichés like the bullet-ridden shootout in slow-mo. There are more WTF moments like Samuel L Jackson and Dwayne Johnson’s brief, semi-funny, weird cameo-introductions. And there’s an underlying plot about financial swindling that ties it all together.

Overall, this is a weird mix of Farrell and everything he’s got. Sometimes it’s entertaining, mostly it’s just baffling. One the biggest “huh??” moments comes as the credits rolls, which also host an powerpoint-worthy animated slideshow about the financial meltdown and the amounts of corruption still on display by the sector now. Time and money may have been better spent doing a documentary on this rather than dress it up as a comedy-satire starring Will Farrell. Out of 24 billion dollars being laundered, The Other Guys make out with 12 billion. Another victim of the Ponzi scheme known as “hilarious comedies” by SNL vets.

Rated: 5/10