MOVIE REVIEW: COP OUT

02/25/10

Kevin Smith is back and this time he is giving the 80’s cop buddy movie a shot. Known for his witty and sometimes obscene dialog, Smith broke into the industry with the hilarious Clerks. Clerks is probably Smith’s best movie followed by Chasing Amy, however movies like Mallrats, Dogma and Clerks II never hit there marks. This might be because Smith is known more for his dialog than this work with the camera. We Kevin Smith loyalists have been waiting for Smith next breakthrough and while I’m not sure he did this here with Copout, he got pretty darn close.

The movie starts with Tracy Morgan playing bad cop and interrogating a suspect while at the same time pretending to be a criminal. He runs through a bunch of lines from other movies all the while the whole police department is watching from behind the glass laughing their heads off. At this point in the movie, I was upset with Morgan’s acting and it only got worst as the movie proceed. The whole thing kept getting worse and worse and absolutely clasped when the main villain was introduced. Granted this is only the first fifteen minutes of movie. If I had to put my finger on it, it was probably Morgan’s performance in the beginning of the movie that threw me off kilter. 

However, after Smith sets up the Mcmuffin, Willis trying to recover a stolen baseball to finance his daughter’s wedding, I had my first laugh. From this point on, I kept laughing and laughing and even Tracy Morgan’s performance started growing on me. That’s when I thought to myself that the main villain didn’t really matter and that the plot wasn’t that important because the movie was in itself hilarious; it just took some time for its magic to work on me. 

Bruce Willis is pitch perfect playing the straight man, but you probably seen Bruce play the same character in about every movie he is in. Tracy is great as the insecure partner who is always worrying that his wife might be cheating on him. Having only experienced Tracy in Saturday Night Live, might have had something to do with my feelings in the beginning of the movie, where I might have thought I was stuck in a long annoying sketch. I also have to mention the hilarious performance by Sean William Scott. When he was on screen it was both annoying and funny all at the same time. 

While it’s true that Kevin Smith has not mastered the use of the camera just yet, I did noticed a much smoother style here. However, lets not forget that Smith is a master at writing witty dialog that will have the audience on their knees. However, Kevin Smith didn't write this movie, and in the end that could have make this a classic. 
 

Review By Milton Brayson
milton@smartcine.com

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