Will Ferrell has grown very tiresome on me. It’s not that he’s run out of material, but rather that he’s never had any material to begin with. He plays his characters like different hues of the same color — and the color is Stupid.
He must begin each movie with Mad Libs: “In this film I am Will Ferrell as a ________ working as a ________.” The blanks are always personality traits and occupation. Anchorman was masculine jerk and news anchor. Blades of Glory was sex addict and figure skater. Talladega Nights was obnoxious redneck and Nascar driver.
Here in The Other Guys the blanks are computer geek and police officer. The performance is funny, like all his performances, but it all feels vaguely familiar, like Ferrell is doing the same character just in different costumes. He’s partnered with Mark Wahlberg, who wears comedy like it’s made of burlap and fire ants. Remember that SNL gag about Wahlberg talking to farm animals? That was not far from the truth in Other Guys, where Marky Mark seems unfit for even the simplest bits, which is strange considering the movie was probably titled from a line Wahlberg delivers in another cop movie, The Departed — “I’m the guy who does his job, you must be the other guy.”
Ferrell is Detective Gamble and Wahlberg is Detective Hoitz on the NYPD. They work in robbery-homicide, although they appear to be doing clerical work for the city inspector — Gamble has a pending investigation involving scaffolding violations. Hoitz is given desk work because he accidentally shot Derek Jeter once in a dark Yankee Stadium tunnel, and now all the other cops call him the Yankee Clipper. (Another cop tells him, “You shoulda shot A-Rod.” So true.)
Hoitz and Gamble share an office with Danson & Highsmith (ampersand intended), hero cops who live in a perpetual Michael Bay movie. In the opening scenes, they eject a hotrod out of a double decker bus into Trump Plaza — Michael Bay, take notes. They’re played by Samuel L. Jackson and Dwayne Johnson as if they thought the movie was starring them. In the end you’ll wish it had.
Anyway, the hero cops eventually meet an unfortunate end (here's a hint: their end involves lots and lots of bagpipes) and the department needs some new cops to take the lead on hot cases, which is where Gamble and Hoitz come in. Of course, though, they’re dimwits. Early in the film, Gamble, in his Prius, accidentally plows through a crime scene, over a bodybagged corpse and into a table full of cocaine evidence. The Prius spends the rest of the film dusted in the fine narcotic powder; at one point a bad guy swipes some off the hood and rubs it on his gums.
There’s another gag where Gamble is tricked into doing a Desk Pop, which is shooting your gun at your desk, something cops do every couple of months to blow off steam. He’s such a doofus that he actually does it and his captain (played by Michael Keaton) takes his gun away and gives him a wooden prop. When the bad guys take the guns later, they return the wooden one to the department but with a nice stain on it. “You should really send them a thank you note,” the captain says. The captain ha some other clever lines, including one where he mixes up the morning briefing (involving serial rapists and murderers) with the morning briefing at his other job at Bed, Bath and Beyond.
Some of the gags are funny, but the movie wasn’t put together very well. It transitions from scene to scene the way television commercials transition together, which is not at all. I kept wondering, “How did the characters get here?” And the action has that shaky Bourne-style editing that involves a million different shots pieced together in semi-chronological order. Also, watch some of the awkward reaction shots at the dinner table sequence; makes you wonder if director of photography was sick that day because the angles are strange and meaningless.
Mostly, though, I just didn’t care for Ferrell and Wahlberg together. The chemistry is there, but the film seems to fluctuate in and out of the sweet spot on their dial. At one point I wondered if the film was ever rehearsed in front of the actual writers. If so, then they would have seen that a three-minute monologue about a lion swimming in the ocean wasn’t really on the money. Neither was Wahlberg doing ballet moves. Nor was an extended sub-plot with Gamble as a pimp with a stable of women who refer to him as Gator.
Some bits are only funny in Ferrell’s head. The Other Guys has more of those jokes than most Ferrell comedies.
