The Other Guys (Review)

Will Ferrell movies are mostly cut from the same cloth. He plays characters that are often incredibly clueless and absurd, and it’s the world around him that tends to separate the good films from the bad. It works best in the brilliant wall-to-wall absurdity of Anchorman, but sometimes when everyone else plays it straight it can work as well, as seen in Elf. Often, however, his films are so caught up in individual gags that it can halt the forward progress of the film, including the all-too-common “Help me, Tom Cruise!” rants that have nothing to do with anything. The strange thing is that a lot of people seem to like those moments, but for me they go on far too long and after the first five minutes I begin to cringe.

The Other Guys, his latest offering, comes at the tail end of a rut for our dear Mr. Ferrell. His last film was Land of the Lost, which no one saw and even less people liked, and the critics were starting to dismiss him, claiming he had already peaked. However, what better way to get on everybody’s good side that by reteaming with his lead creative partner Adam McKay? Together they have made Anchorman, the (overrated) big hit Talladega Nights, and Step Brothers, and they also co-founded the website “Funny or Die”. McKay was head writer on Saturday Night Live during Ferrell’s years there, where he hired Tina Fey. That decision alone will lead me to forgive you of most anything. McKay, unlike many other directors, knows how to use Ferrell, and together they make The Other Guys one of the more pleasant surprises of the summer.

The film begins with a chase sequence with Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson and Samuel L. Jackson chasing bad guys through the streets of New York. These two cops are the heroes of the town, and the idols of everyone else in the police department, including Detective Gamble (Ferrell) and Detective Hoitz (Mark Wahlberg). They have been reduced to office drones, Gamble because he likes the simplicity of it all, and Hoitz because he shot… well, I won’t give that away. Hoitz desperately wants to get back in the field (“I’m a peacock! You gotta let me fly!”), but Gamble is reluctant because of a secret from his past. Whenever they get the chance, however, they tend to mess things up badly.

When Ferrell teams with McKay there is often a great deal of improvisation, but here it does not seem to be quite the case, because unlike their past collaborations The Other Guys is actually quite plot-heavy. If I had to guess, Anchorman likely barely had a script and was the result of a lot of riffing, but it worked out gloriously. Here the characters are a little bit deeper and thus going off-script too much might have been hazardous.

The supporting cast is absolutely brilliant here, a real standout being Michael Keaton as Captain Gene Mauch, who aside from being Captain has a side job at Bed Bath & Beyond. (Yes, it's blatant product placement, but it was funny.) Keaton absolutely kills it every time he’s onscreen, and he’s an actor you just don’t see enough of anymore. Eva Mendes is great in her limited screen time as Gamble’s wife Sheila (one of the film’s great running jokes is that beautiful women find Ferrell’s character irresistible), and Steve Coogan gets some great moments as billionaire David Ershon.

Let us not forget the leads, however. Ferrell, despite one or two “Help me, Tom Cruise”-esque rants, is quite good here as Gamble. Even better is Mark Wahlberg, who has not been in a good movie since The Departed, and he is able to prove that when given good material and a role to work with, he can do some great things. Look at The Happening, which gives him some thankless dialogue and situations, not to mention Wahlberg doesn’t have a high-school science teacher bone in his body. When Wahlberg is able to let loose, he can do some great things.

I was going to write that I would have liked this film to go in a more R-rated direction, but the more I look back on this film the more I’m glad they stayed with the PG-13. Earlier this year we were given an R-rated buddy-cop spoof Cop Out, and nobody cared. It’s easy to fill a script up with f-words, it’s not easy to restrain oneself and focus on effective humor. The Other Guys could have been a great R-rated comedy, but instead it’s a very good PG-13 one, and I’ll live with that any day of the week. The early returns suggest The Other Guys is being embraced by audiences thus far, and sometimes when you go for the money rating it pays dividends.

We haven’t had a very good comedy this summer besides Get Him to the Greek, and while The Other Guys is just a notch below, it makes last week’s Dinner for Schmucks look lazy and dull (which it was, only the cast made it watchable and sometimes enjoyable). August tends to be the month that we are treated to a few comedy gems year after year, examples in past years being Pineapple Express, Superbad, and my favorite pure comedy in the last few years Tropic Thunder. The Other Guys continues that tradition and gives us some real laughs as we head into the fall, when the movies start to put on their serious faces.

Rating: (out of 4)