"Cop" a Feel - Take

“Cop Out” is the first feature feature film directed by Kevin Smith that is not also written by Kevin Smith. It proves beyond a doubt that he is a very talented...writer.

In a related story, I built a time machine, went back to when I was working at the sub shop and ordered a sandwich from myself – a 6-inch tuna with cheddar, no mayo – thus opening a hole in the fabric of space-time to a dimension where Kevin Smith and M. Night Shyamalan team up to make a movie that is both decently written and visually appealing, since neither one of them seems to be able to pull that off over here.

The level of enjoyment you will get out of “Cop Out” will be directly proportional to the level of enjoyment you get out of Tracy Morgan acting(!) stupid and Bruce Willis acting like Kevin Smith has his beloved German Shepherd, Ulrich The Untamed, tied up in the trunk of his car somewhere.  Between Morgan and Seann William Scott, who is still paying off his Karmic debt for indirectly dragging a growing succession of struggling young actors into roles as Stifflers (I caught 2 minutes of “American Pie Presents: Band Camp” on Comedy Central last week – and I do mean caught. My doctor says if I apply the ointment 4 times a day, the rash should clear up in a week or so), there’s more mugging in this movie than there was in the stairwell of my apartment building before they started putting pepper spray in the vending machine.

The movie is “written” by TV veterans Robb and Mark Cullen, but if I were them, I would probably just go back to sticking extraneous consonants onto the end of my name. The alleged “plot” follows Paul Hodges (Morgan), an NYPD detective who has to recover a stolen baseball card to pay for his daughter’s wedding. Bruce Willis plays a jaded, hardcase, wisecracking, bald-headed, seemingly invincible, borderline sociopath who is somehow also gainfully employed by the NYPD.  He is playing that part, however, in a Renny Harlin movie about killer traffic lights when he accidentally wanders onto the wrong set and Hodges, believing him to actually be John McClane, hits him over the head with a sack of nickels. He then spends a full three minutes of screentime cooing into Willis’s ear, “We’re buddies and we’re cops.” It’s pretty weird.

Over the course of the movie, Willis comes to appreciate Hodges’s unorthodox and inept brand of police work, while Hodges just keeps bugging Willis about the time he shot that guy even though he had diplomatic immunity. Eventually they get the baseball card back from the mobsters who stole it, but its corner gets bent in the climactic gun battle, downgrading it from “mint” to “very good” condition. So Hodges’s daughter has to settle for having her wedding in the alley behind Gray’s Papaya, which is really just as well because she was getting kind of all Type A about everything anyway.