The Other Guys

The Other Guys begins with a nasty niggling feeling that this is a film that wants to make a statement. It’s not about hero cops, it’s about “the other guys”. It’s about the people that never make it to the front page. The niggle grows slowly as the story advances, and becomes an itch as the plot threads start to come together. Finally, it erupts fully grown into the awful realisation that this is an “important” film as the end credits drop. The Other Guys isn’t just a comedy full of random humour, spoofs of cop films and jokes about bums having orgies in abandoned cars. It’s a message film about the evils of capitalism and the cost to the regular citizens of America who trusted their money to people who lie, cheat and steal. It’s about how a normal police officer can’t expect to get a decent pension when he retires, while a superstar corporate criminal will parachute into luxury. At least, that’s what the end credits tell us. They’re quite neat, with little animations and graphs explaining how a ponzi scheme works, how CEO salaries have increased exponentially compared to average earnings. We even get the cost per citizen of the T.A.R.P bailout that saved the companies deemed “Too Big To Fail”.

The Other Guys is a message film. Will Ferrell in a political film? Can you believe it? No? Well, good, because really it isn’t. I lied about that nasty niggling feeling, I lied about it wanting to say something. I didn’t lie about the end credits though, they’re a nifty little shorthand for anyone who wants to know how the American economy crashed the way it did. But I don’t honestly think this is a film that’s all that concerned with communicating that message. If it were, it would have a script that pushes the ponzi scheme plot device more than the random and scatterfire jokes. But it doesn’t, so clearly it doesn’t aspire to the soapbox you might occasionally suspect it of climbing on.

Whether you like this film or not will come down to how willing you are to forgive Will Ferrell toning down his manchild act and handing the reins over to Mark Wahlberg. Wahlberg can be funny, and occasionally he is, but he can’t sell the over-the-top humour that Adam McKay has made his trademark. John C. Reilly should’ve been the other cop, he and Ferrell have amazing comedic chemistry. Wahlberg and Ferrell just don’t have it. And Ferrell never really gets the chance to go completely mad the way his roles in previous McKay films (the Anchorman films, Talladega Nights, Step Brothers) have gloried in. Something went wrong in the lab of Doctor Frankenstein this time, and the mix of buddy cop comedy with random weirdness never quite locks in. There’s plenty of laughs, but plenty of jokes fall flat too. By far the best come early, as Samuel L Jackson and Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson take the Lethal Weapon approach to policing to its logical conclusion. But they’re not the stars, and the stars this time aren’t that engaging. They’re the other guys, and while they can be funny, there’s a reason they’re the other guys…

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