The Other Guys (2010)

Watching Step Brothers the previous night got me in the mood for another Will Ferrell film. The Other Guys is his fourth collaboration with director Adam McKay so I had high hopes for this. Also I never thought I would see the day my partner sat down to watch a film with Dwayne 'The Rock' Johnson in it but here we are!

The Other Guys is a parody of the tired genre of buddy cop movies, you know the type: Lethal Weapon, 48 Hours, Beverly Hills Cop. All the clichés are here ready to be ripped into. The Rock and Samuel L Jackson play two hero cops. An all action intro throws them into a car chase that sees their car lodged in the side of a bus then catapulted from it, flying at the bad guys, Jackson blasting away. This brilliantly sends up the over the top nature of action films. The macho jock characters they play provide some of the best moments in their knowingly dumb action scenes.

Allen Gamble (Ferrell) and Terry Hoitz (Mark Wahlberg) are the polar opposites or the 'other guys'. A police pairing so bad that they are the joke of their force. Events conspire to put them on a huge case that could salvage their reputations. They constantly bicker throughout, providing Ferrell the opportunity to indulge in his usual random style, never more so that an argument over who would win in a fight between a lion and a tuna fish! My main gripe with this is Wahlberg's acting. Is there a worse actor than him in the mainstream? This is a man so wooden I did begin to think his style was intentional, part of the parody maybe. Then I remembered watching him in The Happening and realised that this is as good as it gets from him. That aside he does have some good lines but I think they could have been so much better delivered by someone else.

There are some fantastic scenes where this film mocks the genre, like the good cop/bad cop routine where Ferrell fluffs his part as the good cop and plays the mental cop. However after a good start it deteriorates into a fairly dull police investigation starting with scaffolding regulations and moving onto some embezzlement. The laughs do thankfully continue throughout, with some good supporting performances from Michael Keaton as the police chief and Eva Mendez as Ferrell’s impossibly hot wife.

I did feel that this film tries too hard to be random. It never quite has the magic of previous films by the pairing of Ferrell and McKay. Some scenes felt very unnecessary as they try to stick to the pattern of cop movies laid down by this genre. Yet it does deliver a good parody overall and has some fantastic one liners. Ferrell seduces his wife at one point by shouting "I'm gonna do you grandpa style" and "I'm gonna break your hip!" Well worth a watch but sadly not quite up to the standard of what has come before in my mind. I hope this does not mark a decline in Ferrell's career as he starts to get a bit 'old for this shit'.

6/10