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Some chucklehead really thought they were being clever with that title, huh?
I mean, fucking hell, I thought Spycies was bad, but this makes that look downright clever. Apparently, director Michael Dowse wasn’t content to have just one shitty pun title on his resume with last year’s Stuber, and wanted to outdo himself in this area and this area only. Okay, tell a lie, he did go further here than he did with Stuber… far, far, far into the red to make for a Netflix comedy that has me pining for the days of the fucking Do-Over.
The casting here is a combination of astoundingly flat and way-too-good-for-this. Ed Helms’ weeny schtick is long past its prime by this point, and even considering the Cop And A Half-ass formula at play here, there’s nothing about Terrence Little Gardenhigh’s turn as Kareem that made me want to willingly sit through it. Then there’s Betty Gilpin as one of Coffee (Helms)’s fellow officers, who goes so delightfully batshit by the finale that it almost makes up for how she somehow found a more tone-deaf script than The Hunt. To say nothing of Taraji P. Henson as Kareem’s mother, whose entire joke is that the movie should’ve had her in the lead role but the actual leads are incompetent, so let’s essentially blue-ball the audience into seeing snippets of a movie they’d much rather be watching than whatever fresh hell this is.
I’m struggling to figure out what part of writer Shane Mack’s impossibly desperate sense of humour is the most cringe. Is it the cop jokes, which try to ‘tee hee’ their way through police corruption as just a matter-of-fact part of life, in a film that succumbs to boring ‘dirty cops but not all cops’ cliches? Is it the race jokes, between the gangsta drug dealers and Kareem making me realise that Project Power as a standard cop movie wasn’t such a good idea after all? Or is it the paedophile jokes, because in trying to write gags about a police officer teaming up with a child, no-one could be bothered to say something other than the easiest shit possible? Even the gay jokes, which largely reside in a single scene of “gay cop, bad cop” (and that’s a direct quote, by the by), can’t even register a laugh out of making the straights uncomfortable. It’s not bad because it’s foul; it’s bad because it’s basic.
It’s a rather tightly-packed delivery of stupid for a film that isn’t even 90 minutes long, and what makes it remarkable is that stupid is the only thing filling in the margins for all this. The plot is thread-bare and borrows heavily from better cop-action flicks (and even then, the references used on the posters are far better than anything in the actual film), the chemistry between the leads just isn’t there, and I’d make a joke about the humour feeling like it’s just driving around in circles for ages, except the roundabout scene here kind of proves that point for me. Predicting an easy joke doesn’t make your movie critic-proof, numbnuts.
I was pretty fair with Stuber, even with my deep-seated revulsion with its title, but I have no such mercy for this complete vacuum of a movie. Along with being undeserving of what little acting talent it has on offer, shamelessly devoid of creativity in its jokes, and going through the motions under the guise of showing a narrative, its attempts to make fun of the modern state of police work in the United States is disastrously mishandled. Because the only good cops are the ones too weak and ineffectual to confront anyone, apparently. Dude help me, I’d rather eat blue waffle than even consider watching this again; at least that experience would give me something interesting to write about, which this abjectly failed to do.
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