Cop Out

Dir: Kevin Smith
Cast: Bruce Willis, Tracy Morgan, Seann William Scott
(15) 107 minutes

You know how sometimes, someone tells a joke that’s so desperately unfunny, you can practically hear the air itself cringing, gritting its teeth and praying for them to shut up? The kind of joke that makes you genuinely long for death, for both yourself and whichever smirking Michael McIntyre-wannabe first spewed it out? OK, well, now imagine that joke spread out over almost two hours, punctuated with regular blundering ‘action sequences’ and accompanied by incessant, bleeping synths. Then imagine it being shouted in your face by Tracy Morgan. Make you want to napalm a primary school? If so, for Christ’s sake, stay away from Kevin Smith’s latest effort Cop Out, a toe-curlingly dreadful buddy cop movie that’ll unleash the inner Colonel Kilgore in pretty much anyone. I mean it. It’s for your own good.

Now, when it comes to comedy, my tastes are, in general, not particularly highbrow. Infantile blowjob-joke-fests such as Scary Movie 3 and White Chicks usually have me howling with mirth. But, Jesus, there’s a limit. Writers the Cullen brothers seem to equate lengthy scat jokes and lewd sexual imagery with ‘witty banter’, and given that any buddy film is only as good as the exchanges between its leads this pretty much kills the film stone dead before it’s even begun. Ugh. The plot itself somehow manages to be formulaic yet hideously convoluted – I’m not entirely clear on the details, but it’s something to do with a dastardly Hispanic drug baron that kidnapped some other drug baron’s wife, and also stole a valuable baseball card, and shot someone in a church. Oh, and Willis can’t afford his daughter’s wedding and Morgan’s wife may or may not be having an affair. Who the hell cares?

It doesn’t help that the direction is so abysmal. An example of the sheer bloody ineptitude on display here occurs pretty early on, when Willis and Morgan are interrogating some interchangeable minion of the aforementioned dastardly drug baron. As Morgan hurls the dealer against the two-way mirror, shrieking obscenities in a HEEELARIOUS manner, Willis draws a massive phallus in the dealer’s clouded breath on the glass. Desperately, excruciatingly puerile in itself, but it’s when you realise that it’s also PHYSICALLY IMPOSSIBLE given that he’s actually on the other side of the mirror that you really want to start necking the paracetamol. Christ, Smith, is this what you’re reduced to? Even the donkey sex scene in Clerks 2 looks like unattainable comedic genius when compared to this steaming heap.

While none of the cast have much to be proud of here, Morgan deserves a special mention. Poor old Brucey looks, at times, to be utterly mortified even to be sharing a screen with this gurning, hooting moron, who starts off punchable and ends up positively genocide-inducing. It’s little wonder his character’s wife had an affair, for God’s sake.

Anyway, so yes, Cop Out is probably the worst film I’ve seen in a long time. Kevin Smith’s career, I fear, may well end here, and I'm speaking as someone who actually used to be quite the fangirl. Tragic, really...