Cop Out
Dir: Kevin Smith
Rating: 2.0/5.0
Warner Bros.
110 minutes
Some artists you just root for. Despite diminishing returns and well knowing that this person’s earlier stuff is much better than anything he is doing nowadays, you still hold out a bit of hope that his next project will vindicate your creepy obsession with a stranger that does stuff for your amusement. A career trajectory can become more interesting than the output.
Kevin Smith is one such director. A funny, tremendously likable raconteur, the 2000s showed that Smith is a monumentally lazy man. After 1999′s flawed but ambitious Dogma, Smith strung together a series of inside jokes for Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back, tried to sell out with the poorly-timed Jersey Girl and, failing that, tried to win back his extant fanbase with Clerks 2, a film for which I reserve further judgment until a second viewing, save for that I swear he just copied and pasted a few blog posts and tried to pass them off as dialogue. His attempt to reclaim the house he built for Judd Apatow, Zack & Miri Make a Porno, I actually liked. But that one could use a second viewing, too. A career like this and suddenly Smith directing a buddy cop flick becomes a movie I want to see out of morbid curiosity.
Granted, sitting through the film it feels like Smith found the most doable cop story ever written, considering the major MacGuffins in Mark and Robb Cullen’s dialogue-heavy script are a baseball card and a flash drive. The buddy cop milieu and the attempts at clever, funny dialogue smack of a castrated Shane Black script, which made me really wish that Shane Black wrote the thing. It also made me really want to watch The Last Boy Scout again, which has better pacing and Bruce Willis dancing more.
Cop Out shows a bit of growth for Smith, as the director has to do some things that he wouldn’t do in one of his own films. He gets a few actions scenes in, including a myopic, cheap-feeling car chase and an effective climactic shootout that surprisingly conveys things like mood and atmosphere — which should be a given but we’re talking about a director whose style lives on the page. With long-time director of photography, David Klein the thing still looks like a comedy most of the time. But sometimes — just sometimes — the visuals are elevated to the caliber of a TV movie. Baby steps.
As far as characters go, Cop Out is the kind of movie where you refer to the characters by the actors who play them, sparing everyone the silly artifice of character names. Tracy Morgan plays some functionally retarded variation of Tracy Morgan (which is okay, I guess) and Bruce Willis plays some blend of Stock Bruce Willis Character and one of the good iterations of John McClane. As for the third guy in the movie, there’s a spark of promise in Sean William Scott as a touchy-feely thief, but he’s been saddled with that horribly unfunny shtick of repeating what people say as they say it. The big winner of the film is Guillermo Diaz as the gang leader Poh Boy, who brings a ton of energy to a by-the-numbers role that doesn’t even give him a memorable line of dialogue. Oh, and Kevin Pollack and Adam Brody play the requisite rival cops. As you might imagine, Pollack gets at least one impression in there.
The most praise I can drum up for Cop Out is that it’s not nearly as painful as those first unfunny trailers had us believe, but it’s not a spectacular entry in the genre. Maybe if the action scenes were a bit more spectacular and the dialogue funnier, we’d have something more Lethal Weapon, less Blue Streak. The most I get out of Cop Out is that I’m really, really interested in just what Kevin Smith does next.
by Danny Djeljosevic
