Cop Out (2010)

Now that’s what I’m talking about! That’s the kind of craptastic Hollywood garbage I’m used to sitting through in February, watching it pillage the theaters and dumb the minds of any audience suckered into sitting through its lazy, worthless, money-wasting existence! THIS is the kind of movie that allows us to use clichéd, hostile review catch-phrases like “two hours of my time I’ll never get back” and “made me want to kill myself” and be comfortable in the fact that they are indeed as accurate a description as any could ever state. Plus exclamation points! Oh, praise be to the Lord! I’d almost made it the entire month without seeing a movie that made me sick-to-my-stomach angry with anybody even remotely involved in bringing it to the screen.

See that right there? That was sarcasm. It’s sort of kind of almost what director Kevin Smith and his team of hack writers Robb and Mark Cullen were trying to do with Cop Out (2010), a flick that simultaneously lampoons and honors the great buddy-cop action comedies of the '80s. Except no one involved could quite figure out if they were trying to make fun of those films by pointing out their ridiculous clichés, or if they were trying to revive them in an homage to the genre. So they just went ahead and made a crappy movie.

A really crappy movie. Possibly the worst movie I’ve seen millions of dollars wasted on in years. I’m not even going to waste time describing the plot, or analyzing anything that happens in order to help you understand how bad it is. Because the movie doesn’t deserve that time from me. It’s already taken enough.

Anybody familiar with Tracy Morgan’s career revival on 30 Rock knows the quick clips we get of his crazy character’s ridiculously bad movies. Cop Out is like one of those clips, but 107 minutes longer. And you know what the worst part about that is? The joke of those clips is that the films exist, not that it’s funny. The 30 Rock bit is a mockery. And so too is Cop Out.

Cop Out isn’t the least bit funny. It isn’t even interesting. It’s boring. And you know who knows it’s boring? Bruce Willis. That’s why he – CLICHÉ ALERT! – sleepwalks through the whole film, comfortable in the fact that as long as he isn’t trying, it can’t look like he tried to make a good movie and failed. Aside from that, he can be confident that no matter what he does, Tracy Morgan’s terrible overacting will make him look good by comparison.

On 30 Rock, Tracy Morgan is funny. Very funny. But his character Tracy Jordan is really just Tracy Morgan on steroids, written by people familiar enough with the actor to mix a delicate blend of loving humility. In other words, people who successfully do for Morgan what Smith and the Cullens couldn’t do for the buddy cop flick. Morgan is so bad here, you wonder if on 30 Rock he’s anything more than a marionette with Tina Fey pulling his strings.

The only thing worse than Morgan is director Smith, who proved once and for all he’s a better writer and cultural icon than director. Everything here is sloppy. The action sequences are abysmal and incredibly unentertaining. I thought at first it might not be his fault, that maybe the editing was to blame, until I saw in the credits he was responsible for that too.

Cop Out is a complete and utter disaster. Do not watch it. Pretend it isn’t there. At least that way you may be able to look at these people without cringing at the memory. At least that way, you can pretend we don’t live in a world in which audience-robbing, time-suck junk like this doesn’t exist.

I need to lay down. I’m depressed.