A couple of years ago, Saturday Night Live made fun of Mark Wahlberg's oblivious seriousness in a sketch portraying him (played by Andy Samberg) attempting to sternly speak to farm animals who don't talk back. It's a brilliant skit because Samberg effectively, but not explicitly, made fun of Mark Wahlberg's furrowed one-note acting ability. The following week, Wahlberg himself came on the show and made fun of himself by recreating the sketch backstage. I don't know if Wahlberg even realized this, but his appearance was funny not because it's the real Mark Wahlberg talking to farm animals, but because it's the real Mark Wahlberg doing an impersonation of Mark Wahlberg in his serious movies, and playing it totally straight.
Think of Wahlberg in The Other Guys as basically an extension of that brief SNL moment. If you wondered how on earth could he carry one half of a comedy, holding his own against a comic veteran like Will Ferrell, there's the answer. Here we have Wahlberg as Det. Hoitz, basically doing a parody of all his cop roles from We Own the Night to The Departed to Max Payne, but playing it mostly straight. And man, that's funny.
He screams through half the movie, blows a gasket at random, and stupidly concludes that everyone and everything are connected to a dangerous drug cartel, even though the movie has absolutely nothing to do with drugs at all. In another film, this performance awarded Wahlberg a perplexing Oscar nomination. Here, the absurdity of his tantrum is highlighted, like in the scene where Hoitz walks into a ballet practice and starts yelling at his ballet dancer ex-girlfriend for stooping so low as to becoming a stripper (the poles there are horizontal, the girl then corrects him). When Will Ferrell's character Det. Gamble, his dorky partner on the force, asks Hoitz why he's so angry all the time, the question leaps out of the screen and shoots through Wahlberg's filmography.
If it sounds like I fixated too much on Wahlberg's performance, that's because those mini fourth-wall breaking winks are the best thing about an otherwise bland and tediously long buddy cop movie. As the title suggests, the movie is about "the other guys," the cops who are not the rock stars movies portray them to be. For emphasis, it opens with Dwayne Johnson and Samuel L. Jackson playing a version of Will Smith and Martin Lawrence from Bad Boys. The gimmick would have grown thin eventually, but it's a good one: instead of following the heroic badasses, we spy on the guys who don't catch the glory—the guys chained to the desk, doing the police work the "Bad Boys" won't. Yet it's predictable that they end up being the typical buddy cops the formula demands them to be.
It fares better when it embraces the fact that it's not a movie that can really stand on its own; it survives (and becomes funny) at the expense of the buddy cop movie culture. Not so much hugging it lovingly and doing the genre justice like Hot Fuzz, but more like the little brother that knows it can't be like the real deal and has fun with it anyway. The action scenes are pretty terrible, but they know it, and when they accomplish even the most common stunts, the characters have to remark on how incredibly it was, as if to admit their amateur status.
There's a subtle class humor at play, too—never pointed out, but definitely there. Our two cops exist in ironic middle-class white dude world, deliberately mired in tropes but in combat with the genre's usual preference for blue collar and/or the streets. Gamble and Hoitz eat Chinese food while discussing a case, but at a fancy restaurant instead of out of take-out boxes; the craggy captain (Michael Keaton) works two jobs because he can't afford his son's NYU tuition on a cop's salary, but he moonlights as a manager at Bed Bath & Beyond. Not to mention that the villain is a posh British guy (Steve Coogan) working a ponzi scheme—which makes Hoitz's one-track-mind for a drug ring even funnier. Even the locations are gags themselves, poking fun at cop movies' romanticism of New York grit. The Other Guys gives us the New York that safe and bland people know: tourists, Jersey Boys, Nathan's hot dog, and even a climactic helicopter battle set in Chelsea Piers' golf range.
In the ballet practice scene I mentioned earlier, Det. Hoitz shows off to his ex by performing a couple of impressive spins. Gamble asks him where he learned to dance like that, and Hoitz says he took ballet lessons as a kid so he can make fun of the queer kids. Gamble: "You learned how to dance sarcastically?"
It's a good joke, and it's also the philosophy behind the film. Director Adam McKay and co-writer Chris Henchy made a buddy cop film sarcastically. Like Hoitz and his dance lessons, it's either a really stupid thing to do or some kind of denial, but the result is a buddy cop movie that thinks it's too cool to be a good buddy cop movie so it attempts to be a good buddy cop movie by being a bad one, but only ironically so. Hey, it's the first hipster cop movie!
"The Other Guys" opens August 6, 2010 and is rated PG13. Comedy. Written by Adam McKay & Chris Henchy. Starring Dwayne Johnson, Eva Mendes, Mark Wahlberg, Michael Keaton, Ray Stevenson, Samuel L Jackson, Steve Coogan, Will Ferrell.
