Other Guys, The

Man, this has been a shitty summer for movies. When you write a sentence like that right off the bat you know what follows is either going to support that statement or disprove that statement. I will attempt to make poorly-written-essay history by now doing neither. Let's talk about “The Other Guys.” This movie is really funny, but not that good. It stands out in a lackluster summer as being better than a lot of what came out, but in general it's only slightly better than average (hah! fuck you opening sentence). I had high expectations because look at the track record of Will Ferrell and Adam McKay. “Anchorman” is silly but hilarious. “Talladega Nights” is a good movie as well as a good comedy. “Step Brothers” was a less ambitious movie but still ridiculously funny. So what stopped the streak? “The Other Guys” did.

“The Other Guys” is a buddy cop movie satire. Imagine all those movies like “Bad Boys” and “48 hours” and “Rush Hour,” this is about the other people who work at the police station trying to get out from the shadow of their loose canon ass kicking counterparts. Already that’s a funny premise. A premise that is similar to one of the worst movies I've ever seen, “Cop Out,” this movie is in much more capable hands. For awhile this movie is really really funny. But it gets lost in its own poor plotting. All too often cop movies revolve around a murder or a drug deal or some other crime, and I admire that in this film the villain is corporate America. Wall Street has more crooks than Juarez, Mexico as far as I'm concerned, so I'm glad this film decided to go after the real criminals in our world. However it's totally and utterly boring. This movie suffers a lot because it is just so long and slow.

The weirdest thing about this movie is the credits. I liked the subtle approach to sticking it to all the white collar criminals who made a ton of money off of other peoples suffering, but during the credits they beat a dead horse by giving you lots of stats about it. They took themselves too seriously which is dangerous for a comedy. Hey, I get it Adam McKay, I'm pissed off too but this isn't a Michael Moore movie, it's a buddy cop satire. So the bottom line is this: this movie is full of really good jokes, and holds on for a while. But ultimately it's way too long. My advice is to go see “Dinner for Schmucks” instead and catch this one on TV.