Originally titled A Couple of Dicks, this is the latest movie from Writer/Director Kevin Smith. Except that's only half true. Cop Out is the first and only movie Kevin Smith has directed without having written. There's no Jay. No Silent Bob. No New Jersey and only one cameo from someone who was in Chasing Amy.

The story is as follows; Bruce Willis and Tracy Morgan are a pair of New York Cops on the trail of a drug czar. But forget about that. Bruce Willis' daughter [Michelle Trachtenberg off Buffy] is getting married, and Bruce needs a bunch of money to pay for the wedding otherwise his wife's new husband [Chasing Amy's Jason Lee] is gonna swoop in, pay up and take all the credit, making Bruce look like a deadbeat. He's a grizzled law man with a comedy partner, a divorce hanging over his head and a daughter he has to impress. Like at the beginning of Die Hard 4.0. His partner is Tracy Morgan, which is who you get when you sort of want Eddie Murphy but not really. He plays Bruce's partner, the single least likely veteran policeman in the history of man, who's having a subplot about being constantly jealous of his wife cheating on him. It doesn't really go anywhere and winds up being mostly forgotten by the end of the 2nd act, but it DOES spawn one of the best lines in the film [“You Monocle Wearing Mother Fucker!”] and so I don't mind it too much.

In order to make the money he needs, Bruce must sell his Grandfather's mint condition Somebody Paffman baseball card. Sadly the shop gets robbed by Sean William Scott JUST as Bruce is about to get his cash. Tracy Morgan is busy outside calling his wife to make sure she's not cheating on him [see... subplot!] and so he does nothing to help. Actually that happens about 4 times, removing yet more Jenga pieces in the ‘He's been a cop for 9 years’ tower]. As circularity would have it, Sean William Scott sells the baseball card to the very same drug czar they were after at the start, and etcetera. This movie really isn't anything. That's not to say it's bad. As a comedy it achieves many of its goals and does make you laugh, but all the way through you're just being reminded of other better films you could be watching.

Bruce and Tracy will be chatting on the car and you'll think "Hey... you know what movie this reminds me of? Lethal Weapon. Let's put that on!". Cop Out takes all the best aspects from your favourite buddy cop movies and then over-boils them until all the nutrients are left in a green puddle in the sink. It is so much lesser than the sum of its parts, and blame rests squarely on the shoulders of the script. It's just no good. The plot itself of the wedding and such is so fucking thin you'd be hard pressed to print a Bible verse onto it. Bruce and Tracy have NO chemistry at all and I didn't believe for a second that they'd been friends for almost a decade. Every other character in the movie, be they the drug dealer, Tracy's wife, the rival cops [played by Adam Brody and Kevin Pollack who, for all the time they were given, could have shot their entire parts in an afternoon] are either underused to the point of irrelevance or just pointless to begin with. The dialogue is unnatural and a lot of the comedy is shoe-horned in. It's like someone doing jokes when your helicopter's going down.

On the plus side, the movie looks good. It's shot exactly how the material (such as it is) needed to be shot and shows a great step forward in the evolution of Kevin Smith as a Director. He's gone from mostly static shots in his sophomore movies, to more experimental in Clerks 2, polished the skills in Zack and Miri and now he's using camera movement to accentuate drama and cutting his action set pieces together very smoothly. It's just a shame that the rest of the departments didn't live up to the example set by Smith and his DoP. The script is the written equivalent of cutting pictures of all your favourite celebrity women's body parts out of a magazine and sticking them together to create the Hottest Girl Ever. You think that all the best bits in one package
must be amazing, but in actuality it's a mess of mismatched gluing and rough edges. Bruce Willis performs the part of Jimmy Munroe into an answer machine while rehearsing for something else and Tracy Morgan yells a great deal and is easily distracted.

Cop Out is a good looking, reasonably funny if lazily written, and disinterestedly acted movie. Might have been a better idea to have had a go at writing it yourself in the end Kev.