ANYONE who has ever seen a Will Ferrell movie should have a pretty good idea of what to expect from The Other Guys: Ferrell playing a dimwit with a big personality, a cast filled with funnymen and a beautiful lead actress (Eva Mendes this time). Take these three ingredients and throw them into any storyline—for the most part the formula has resulted in success.
The Other Guys is about two disgraced cops, Allen Gamble (Ferrell) and Terry Hoitz (Mark Wahlberg), looking to step out from the shadows and claim the roles of star detectives held by fellow detectives P.K. Highsmith (Samuel L. Jackson) and Christopher Danson (Dwayne Johnson). Gamble and Hoitz stumble upon a seemingly dull case that no one else wants to touch, opening the door for them to finally stop being the butt of the rest of the department’s jokes.
Ferrell’s Gamble is a socially awkward detective just looking to get through each day by handling the accounting side of police work. He fears taking the streets and is comfortable in his own innocuous bubble of unmasculine, unambitious behavior. Wahlberg’s Hoitz provides the kind of extreme vexation that having to deal with Ferrell’s character on a daily basis inevitably leads to. Hoitz is angry all the time, not just because of Gamble’s strange behavior, but because of a mistake he made a while back that derailed his fast track path to being a top detective. Despite the excellent comedy pairing by the leads, the antics begin to run stale, and Gamble lacks the hilarious, good-natured stupidity of, say, a Ron Burgundy. Ferrell attempts to use more dry humor here rather than the outsized expressive comedy we’re used to seeing from him. Other “other guys” detectives Martin and Fosse (Rob Riggle and Damon Wayans Jr.) deliver some of the film’s better one-liners, usually at the expense of our well-meaning protagonists. Their quips and sometimes-controversial lines carry the movie for long portions. The Other Guys is not as bad as Land of the Lost, but it fails to reach the uproarious levels of Step Brothers or Talladega Nights. Still, the film provides a reasonable amount of laughs and quotable lines for a disposable summer comedy.
The Other Guys
PG-13; 107 min.
Plays valleyide
