The Other Guys

I went to see The Other Guys with two coworkers yesterday. It was the only thing we all agreed we could watch. If not that, I probably would have wound up seeing Eat, Pray, Love, since both my coworkers expressed some interest in that. I suppose they could have seen that, and I could have watched Scott Pilgrim on my own, since I'm moderately curious about it*. But watching a movie alone sort of defeats the purpose of going to the theater with other people. There was also The Expendables, but while I'd watch that in the hopes of laughing a lot, I'm not spending any of my own money on it. The Other Guys it was.

You have two cops, Gamble (Will Ferrell), and Hoitz (Mark Wahlberg). They're the butt of plenty of jokes in the precinct, and generally despised. Hoitz also hates Gamble for being unmanly, and tells him so frequently, when he isn't threatening everyone he meets, or loudly bemoaning his own fate. They stumble onto a vast criminal scheme through a more mundane route than is typical for cop movies, but quickly encounter the same sorts of problems. Their Captain is being pressured from above, because these criminals Have Influence, and our heroes suffer numerous setbacks, at least partially because they can't stop fighting with each other enough to be competent. The last part of the movie has a chase sequence, and there's a big gunfight a little earlier that seems as unlikely as you'd expect, and the ending isn't too far off from what you'd expect.

I can't tell how much this is supposed to be spoofing typical cop movies. It starts with Highsmith (Samuel L. Jackson) and Danson (Dwayne Johnson) as the two hotshot cops who do all the risky, property destroying stuff we see in cop movies, and the public (and their fellow officers) love them for it. Then, near the end, the Captain asks Gamble and Hoitz if they realize Highsmith and Danson weren't good cops, and they say they do. Then they proceed to do exactly the sort of stuff those guys did. Drive recklessly, have shootouts while sliding on top of tables, get helicopters to crash, so on. By the end, Gamble and Hoitz are driving a muscle car just like Highsmith and Danson, so have they become those guys? One of my coworkers noticed that, and her theory was Gamble and Hoitz weren't going in intending to do those things, it just happened in the course of their investigation, while Highsmith and Danson went out of there way to do that stuff, for their egos. Which makes a certain amount of sense, but Gamble and Hoitz certainly seemed to be enjoying themselves at the time.

I don't believe they should have explained why Gamble was so condescending towards his wife. It didn't excuse his behavior as far as I was concerned, so I shared Hoitz' shock and irritation towards Gamble, at least in that regard. I laughed a lot early in the movie, much less so during the middle of it. Hoitz' seemingly constant anger, and Gamble's treatment of his wife wore on me during that stretch. The end was better, though still not as funny as the beginning.

* Mostly to see if it really does commit to its particular style as completely as Speed Racer did, which is what I've heard.