Buddy cop comedy a flat tale of flatfoots

The proof is in the pudding, my friends — Kevin Smith neither knows how to direct nor cares about the content of any movie that he did not write. All the evidence that you need to confirm this statement is contained in Cop Out. Sure, he was at the helm for this odd couple/buddy cop hybrid but he wasn’t the screenwriter and has no business being involved with it in any way.

This movie is about a couple of cops who stumble onto information that can help them take down a Mexican drug lord named Poh Boy (Guillermo Diaz) in New York. It’s too bad they mess up the sting, the bad guy gets away and they lose face in front of all of their detective buddies. At the same time Jimmy Monroe (Bruce Willis) is trying to figure out how to pay for his daughter’s expensive wedding, a feat made even more unreachable now that he’s been suspended without pay. He seeks to sell a prized and pristine baseball card for a large fortune but as he’s in the middle of having it appraised, the store gets robbed. The thief then sells the card to the very same drug lord in exchange for narcotics. It turns out that Poh Boy is a big sports fan and serious collector of memorabilia. How coincidental!

Think Beverly Hills Cop and you’ve got the prime template for this iteration. You’ve got the straight cop (Willis), the goofy wild card cop (Tracy Morgan, working as hard as possible to make his lines humorous) and the foreign bad guy (Diaz). The beautiful woman caught in the middle? Check. The quick-to-rage police sergeant? Check. The scene where the two protagonists have to turn in their guns and badges because of their shenanigans? Check. Harold Faltermeyer even did the synthesizer soundtrack, almost completely mimicking his music from Beverly Hills Cop.

The main problem is that the components of the story and the key characters are all lined up well enough but no one thought to run it through the fun machine. It all comes across as static as possible, making it seem like all of the players, including Smith, are just going through the motions. Sure Morgan and Seann William Scott (as the parkour-loving druggie thief) yuk it up as much as possible but when the funniest part of the entire 107-minute show is when Morgan eats a few nacho chips, you know that something is rotten.

Cop Out is really disappointing, a pointless exercise in formulaic moviemaking that proved the opposite hypothesis, that success can be achieved solely by putting all of the pieces together in the right order. The problem is that they overlooked one corner of the puzzle — the one with the movie’s soul. If I were Kevin Smith, I wouldn’t have agreed to direct this movie in the first place, or at least given credit to Alan Smithee (the pseudonym for the non-existent director of movies that not even real people want to be associated with). Whatever favour he satisfied by taking this one on, I hope it came with a big slice of humble pie, preferably raspberry.