About halfway through this movie I hopped on IMDB and RottenTomatos to see what others had thought of it. I knew it had been panned, but something struck me in reading some other reviews. A lot of people think this was intended as a parody of 80's cop buddy movies. I honestly had no clue that that's what I might have been watching for 45 minutes.
Kevin Smith got tagged big time for his role as director of this movie but really that's the least of this films woes.
Let's start with the script. I don't know how it looked when it was written, but on the screen it's an utter mess. There are a couple of main plots that are so absurdly woven together that it might as well have been written in some sort of mad libs screenplay generator. The movie has no tone to it at all. Was I watching a parody? A recreation that intended to parody something, but left out the actual parody and just left you to say "Oh yeah, this is the scene where....."
Anyway, the script is awful, near incoherent in it's ridiculousness and just a plain old silly hodgepodge. Some scenes play like skits for Tracy Morgan, the next scene might feature an out of nowhere, fairly brutal murder or death, and yet another scene may feature Bruce Willis looking for all the world like he'd rather be anywhere but in it.
Morgan is the movies main failure. While he is pretty funny on more than one occasion, he has zero acting ability at all. He can't do anything outside the realm of "being Tracy Morgan", which works in 30 second bursts on TV, but not in a feature film.
When it comes to Willis you get the sense that he realizes he's in a turd and reacts thusly. In some action scenes it appears he doesn't even want to move. He recites tongue in cheek lines with all the zest of poop, and more often than not looks flat out bored. There are scenes where all he has to do is turn his head to react to people and it seems as if even this is a bit of a bother to him. I can't blame him however.
Sean William Scott actually provides the movies funniest moments, along with perhaps it's weirdest. Ok, it is the weirdest [spoiler]He breaks his neck and dies out of nowhere in a cringe worthy shot, then we look at him laying dead for a good 30 seconds while comedy ensues[/spoiler] I mean, what the fuck?
In summation, this is just a jumbled mess of a film that seems like nobody involved, on any level, had any interest in making. It's only redeeming quality is seeing just how something so badly constructed can look.
It's no Cop Out to refuse to watch this clunker.
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