The Other Guys: Review

The Other Guys

Directed by: Adam McKay
Starring Will Ferrell and Mark Wahlberg

Sometimes a movie tries to be too many different types of film and suffers for it. Sometimes a movie can have different styles, different messages and switch genres every five minutes and still pull off an entertaining, hilarious thrill-ride: The Other Guys gets it done.

The jokes are both subtle (sometimes) and outrageous (much more often) but are nearly always funny. Sure, there are some misses here and there, but that’s to be expected when there are just so damn many of them. More often that not, they find their mark.

Narrated by a man who once sang about killing cops and now plays one on TV (Ice-T) this is one of the better “buddy-cop” movies to come along, and it’s certainly one of the better “buddy-cop” parodies ever done. That’s what makes The Other Guys interesting; it’s much more than typical “parodies” like Date Movie and Scary Movie, it actually has decent acting, a real story, and more importantly, biting political satire. Still, it is a parody. Not just of buddy-cop films, but of action films altogether. The action sequences are so ridiculous they border on surreal, thus lambasting the typical over-the-top action seen in so many movies where the hero can fly his car through any old building and emerge without a scratch. Just when you think this is how they’re going to do it, cheesy violence with no consequences, they switch gears and suddenly the “heroes” at the start of the film meet a very real (though inexplicable) end.

This is where our main characters, Detective Allen Gamble (Ferrell) and Detective Terry Hoitz (Wahlberg) come in. Both have been delegated to back-up detectives, helping the real cops who are on the street fighting crime, by doing paper work. Gamble is very happy and safe pushing paper and crunching numbers, whereas Hoitz is itching to get back out on the street. The back story of how these two ended up where they are is hilarious and I won’t ruin it for you here, but then a case comes down that prods them away from their desks.

The gags are great. Gamble and Hoitz getting “tricked” into accepting bribes, the hobo orgies and desecration of Gamble’s Prius; the Prius itself contrasting with the super-cops’ mint condition SS Chevelle and the scorching hotness of Gamble’s wife (Eva Mendes) and their bizarre relationship. Perhaps the best gag of all though, is the political humour and surprising insight. You don’t expect the savvy lines about the bail out of the ultra rich being blended into a movie like this, but just in case you missed it (and there’s a good chance that we did) the end credits knock it over your head—but in a good way.

I joked that the end credits were the best part of Robin Hood in an earlier review (they were) but these end credits are even better. Filled with well researched facts (Sony insisted for fear of lawsuits) the end credits spell out the huge gap between what large financial corporations and executives get away with in relation to the rest of us. My favourite was the CEO salary compared to the average employee salary. Starting at about 10 to 1 in 1924 it slowly grew to about 20 to 1 in the 1950s … it is now currently 319 to 1. If that doesn’t piss you off, I don’t know what will. Some might feel it’s a little jarring that these Michael Moore-like credits come at the end of The Other Guys but there are hints of this message throughout, as well as the crime that they are investigating itself. It may have been a better film if this theme was explored a little more but we should be happy for any political message at all in what is otherwise a zany, buddy-cop flick.

Kudos should also go out to Ferrell and Wahlberg. We expect them to be funny, especially Ferrell, but they also make the viewer care about these guys. It’s not a big dramatic turn or anything; they just both have the ability to create empathy for characters that aren’t all that likeable.

Check out The Other Guys. It’s not perfect, there are a couple of lulls, but it’s inventive, different, takes unexpected turns, and has a slyly hidden political punch.

Point of Interest: As mentioned earlier the hero cops drive around in a mint condition ’69 SS Chevelle. I love this. It’s a shot at so many different films and TV shows where the tough cops always drive a cool muscle car. I happen to love old muscle cars so I’ve always noticed this little quirk. What’s great about The Other Guys is when this beautiful Chevelle gets destroyed they’re driving a different Chevelle the next day. And, naturally, once our leads earn their chops, they have a mint condition first generation Camaro … perfect.