Saturday, August 7, 2010

The Other Guys

After success with movies like Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby, Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, and Step Brothers, comedian Will Ferrell and director Adam McKay have proven themselves as some of the top comedic geniuses of our generation. This time around, the duo teams up with Mark Wahlberg to bring us The Other Guys.

Will Ferrell and Mark Wahlberg (formerly Marky Mark of the Funky Bunch) play two pencil pushing detectives who don't get out much and only want to live up to their idols, played my Dwayne Johnson and Samuel L. Jackson (who looks like he just got off the set of another Shaft movie). They plan on doing this by uncovering a huge scandal involving the lottery, a multibillion dollar company, and snotty British-American capitalists.

Honestly, there isn't much of a plot here; only the obscure illusion of a plot that only exists so the writers have something to go with and hold the movie together. In reality, the movie doesn't really hold together all that well and eventually the plot becomes so burried in spoof antics of the cliché buddy-cop film,  that we stop carring about the plot all together and just wait for the next laugh out loud moment.

This isn't McKay's best directed film. There are a lot of awkward cuts that don't make sense and a lot of the action scenes are choppy to the point where it is difficult to follow along, especially the opening chase sequence with Johnson and Jackson.

But in the end this is a comedy and we are willing to let everything bad about this movie slide just because it is so gosh, darn funny. Will Ferrell shines in this film, especially, as the nice guy that we all like to like. Ferrell can chalk this preformance up there with his funniest characters like Ricky Bobby and Ron Burgundy. Wahlberg gets a few laughs out of us as well as the angry guy who always yells, but his yelling gets tiresome by the end of the movie.  Sam Jackson and Dwayne "the Rock" are also very funny in their ten minutes of screen time; it's not that long but it is definitely worth it.

I must say, however, that by the second half of the movie, the laugh out loud moments become less frequent and it starts to run out of steam by the end, as it starts referring back to jokes made in the first half of the movie that have lost their novelty. There are a few very funny joke, very fresh jokes towards the end of the movie, but there just isn't enough.

In the end, the first half of this film is some of the funnist stuff I've seen in a movie and it makes the entire movie worth paying the $8 for. If you like Will Ferrell and movies like Anchorman, then you will like this movie.

This movie is so funny that I have to say see this film.

1 comment:

  1. It's funny, and it could have been better, but I was entertained so much by Wahlberg and Ferrell constantly playing off each other.

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