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STUDIO: Warner Brothers
MSRP: $35.99
RATED: R
RUNNING TIME: 107 minutes
SPECIAL FEATURES:
• Maximum Comedy Mode
• Featurettes
The Pitch
Two cops try to restore their good names, while rescuing a Mexican and a baseball card.
The Humans
Bruce Willis, Tracy Morgan, Rashida Jones, Fred Armisen and Jason Lee
The Nutshell
Cop Out was Kevin Smith’s first major studio film as a hired hand. Working from a script he didn’t write, Smith tried to make a buddy cop film that would rest comfortably against your copy of Second Sight and Beverly Hills Cop III. It takes about five minutes before you realize that you’re probably never going to watch this film again. That doesn’t mean this was a bad film. It’s just that Smith has captured that premium cable television filler movie mindset. Basically, he just created a cop film that fulfills the bare minimum of genre requirements.
The Lowdown
The online beatdown of Kevin Smith’s movies is pretty tiresome by now. The guy can’t do anything stronger than a two-shot with pop culture laden dialogue. Smith used to represent the working class youth slob of the 1990s, now he’s the parent filmmaker that overuses pop music in his films. The guy uses his wife too much in films. Hell, he made Seth Rogen seem more tiresome than ever before. There are other comments to be made, but I’ve only got a small window of time. We’re here to address the film, not to slam the director.
Cop Out begins with a cell phone store stakeout gone wrong. The police lose their main informant and our heroes are suspended from the force. Bruce Willis can’t deal with Tracy Morgan’s antics, as he has a whole mess of shit going on in his private life. Bruce’s daughter is getting married and his ex-wife is trying to cut him out of the festivities. Naturally, Willis wants to find a way to be more involved. That’s when he decides to sell a rare baseball card to pay for the event. When Willis and Morgan go to a card shop to sell it, they are attacked by Seann William Scott.
Bruce Willis seems to sleepwalk through the film in a manner that’s quite obvious. When he’s getting bitched out by his superior officer, he shows the same emotion. When he’s getting tasered by a thug, he shows the same emotion. When he’s dealing with Jason Lee’s smarmy character, it’s the same poker face. If you find fault with that, Kevin Smith seemed to counter program the obvious with Morgan’s antics. Tracy Morgan works when he has excellent writing and grounding. Basically, Tina Fey should follow his ass around with a team of writers and a cattle prod. When Willis and Morgan share a scene, there is no middle ground for this manic-depressive male coupling.
Cop Out could have been the film that let Kevin Smith forever break away from his New Jersey saga. What it did was to show the world that Smith knows nothing about working outside his comfort zones. You could start to see the slide in the latter half of Clerks 2. Hell, that shit was all over Jersey Girl. When you have a director that wants to mature and develop his style with no developed ideas…you get this film. A lot of people called the last generation of filmmakers the VHS generation. There’s something lost when a filmmaker has nothing to cite other than constant retreads of video comfort food. During press for the film, Smith brought up that film was the kind of movie that his father would’ve enjoyed. There’s something to that.
No one’s going to remember this film in a year or two. Hell, it seems as though Smith is pushing ahead on Red State and Hit Somebody to wash the taste of this turd out of his mouth. But, when you hear Smith discuss Cop Out at length, it becomes obvious that he was trying to make a modern take on the 80s buddy cop picture. For younger film fanatics, the buddy cop picture has become forever bonded to the Lethal Weapon series. What they don’t realize is the sheer glut of clones and copycat pictures that flooded the market throughout the late 1980s and early 1990s. Revisiting Smith’s comments from the PR rounds and the video commentary almost makes his statement seem like a Cop Out. If you fail and say that it was only because you were trying to make a mainstream clone of a clone of a decent picture, you might believe that it absolves you of any guilt.
What pisses me off about this is that Smith fails to find new ground with those tired old comedies. A better director could’ve mined something more out of Morgan’s seemingly dying relationship with his wife. There would’ve been something done with Scott’s bandit character. Hell, Bruce Willis could’ve been made to look like he actually gave a damn about the film. The absence of thought in this picture leads a viewer to wonder why in the hell they should bother watching it. The blame falls back on Smith, as he had time to go over this script and gut it to his specifications.
Cop Out wants to juggle so much, but nothing is ever developed. Since Smith didn’t bother to develop the A plot, much less the B or C…we get it all piled into one giant mess. This becomes more obvious when you see Kevin Pollak and Adam Brody as a pair of fellow cops who antagonize Morgan and Willis throughout the picture. The brief moments we get with Brody and Pollak show a tighter focus that was painfully missing from the main story. Does anything note happen with Pollak and Brody? No, because Smith has to rush back into the wife troubles and various hang-ups that come from a crowded script. There’s no attempt to drop any dead weight from the picture, so you end up with an action comedy that lasts twenty minutes too long.
For the people expecting me to slam Kevin Smith, I’m not going to do it. There’s nothing that I can say or do that Southwest Airlines/Mainstream Audiences/Life hasn’t done before me. The issues I noted above could happen to any director that slams through a film without any thought or regard for the final product. It’s lazy filmmaking from a director whose name is become tied to the image of the lazy director. It used to be when a director made a terrible movie, they kept their head low and moved onto the next project. What a difference the Internet makes. You have twenty-four hours of saturation from artists, fans and those in-between that all want answers for every little thing. The result is a lot of blame passed and no one ever taking ownership for the turd in the punch bowl.
The
VC-1
encoded transfer is very average. When you’re in well-lit scenarios, you get amazing levels of detail. Long-time Smith associate Dave Klein served as the Director of Photography and he fares well. That is until he hits any scene without natural/excessive lighting. There’s a car chase towards the middle of the flick that is plagued with terrible edge enhancement. Warner Brothers should be shamed into revisiting this transfer for a future release. Hell, it’s bad for a 1998 flipper disc DVD. The DTS-HD master audio track works slightly better, as it pumps all 5.1 channels to adequate levels.
The Package
The
Blu-Ray
follows this weird pattern for Warner Brothers releases since
they released that they could drive DVD sales to the next-gen by force.
Sure, you could buy just the DVD and get some basic featurettes. But, you wouldn’t get Maximum Movie Mode. This BD enhanced featurette takes the bulk of the special features and mixes them together with a video commentary. This approach stretches the film out to nearly three hours in length. Kevin Smith and guests stop the film and go through what was cut/what happened. It’s not as much fun as the Mallrats or Chasing Amy commentaries of old. But, it’s a novel way to try and extend the shelf life of this tepid little movie.