It has been a while since anyone in Hollywood tried to legitimately throw together a biracial buddy-cop flick. Well, now it’s back with “Cop Out” starring Bruce Willis as Jimmy and Tracy Morgan as Paul, two NYPD partners with unorthodox methods.
Jimmy and Paul are thrown into the middle of a drug ring when Jimmy’s very rare baseball card is stolen and winds up in the hands of the kingpin named Poh Boy, played by Guillermo Diaz, probably best known as Scarface in “Half-Baked.”
Jimmy and Paul pull all the stops to bring down Poh Boy and retrieve Jimmy’s card. A procuring criminal, played hilariously by Sean William Scott, duping strangers, and pulling in aid from rival partner-duo of Mangold and Hunsaker, played by Adam Brody and Kevin Pollack with a bromance twist, are all involved.
“Cop Out” tries to bank on the biracial, wild-cop, tame-cop thing the “Lethal Weapon” series did so long ago, but sadly, it falls short of the Gibson and Glover Gang.
The acting throughout the film is fairly stale and the humor is over the top, but it has its moments. Tracy Morgan acts in his typical over-the-top fashion, and sometimes it works, but most of the time it is annoying and juvenile. Bruce Willis is his “Die Hard” John McClane badass, minus the stick up his butt, and all the Hispanic gangsters speak Spanish as though they were just learning it.
“Cop Out” tries to do a little too much in too little time, and it suffers, but in the long run, it has its moments where no matter what, you will be laughing out loud. For the price of ticket at the Small, “Cop Out” is worth it, because how bad can a buddy-cop movie really be?
