On the Other Hand

I like comedies, but not a lot of recent comedies. But I'm willing to give something like The Other Guys (2010) a try. 

It starts with a high-speed action scene in New York with super-cops Samuel L. Jackson and Dwayne Johnson demolishing large parts of the city to capture some guys with a half key of grass. They are much beloved by the city and in the precinct house, unlike some of the other guys. Specifically, non-super cops Mark Wahlberg and Will Ferrell. However, when the supers try to stop a jewelry store robbery, they take it a little too far: They jump off a tall building and die - they were aiming for the bushes, but there were no bushes.

The other cops are now hoping to become the new super-cops. Wahlberg wants to go for it, but Ferrell isn't that kind of cop - he's a forensic accountant, who is on the trail of a scaffolding permit scofflaw. That scofflaw turns out to be Steve Coogan, who has a couple of other shady deals going on.

First of all, I sort of like Will Ferrell, but I feel like he leans too hard on goofy improv. Not bad improv, but more like, he comes up with something random and goofy, and then just keeps coming back to it. Sometimes he doubles down, but I don't think it ever really pays off. Here, he seems to be irresistible to women. His wife, who he calls plain, is Eva Mendes. Every other good looking woman in the movie drools over him. It turns out, he protected some women who ran a dating service in college - that is, he was a pimp. The idea of Ferrell as gal-bait is pretty silly, as a pimp, ridiculous. But it doesn't play out in any meaningful way.

Wahlberg, on the other hand, plays a guy with anger issues, busted down in rank because he accidentally shot Derek Jeter. He is the straight man in the comb, and doesn't get as much to do, except try to get Ferrell to be more manly. But he doesn't do badly. But the levels of toxic masculinity in this movie get a bit high, even for the old-timey 2010s.

Still, it's mostly pretty funny, with some good action scenes. And the moral is that the real criminals are the billionaires and the system that robs everyone of their human dignity. And the real heroes are the simple men and women just doing their jobs to protect us.