I’m back.
So when I went to see The Other Guys at the cinema last week I went in with fairly low expectations. I’m not a big Will Ferrell fan, as although he has done some good stuff, he has also done a fair quantity of bad stuff and there is something in his general demeanour that gets me off on the wrong foot. I think its the near permanent look of slight surprise and social awkwardness that most of his characters seem to have. Also going against The Other Guys was a blog post from a friend of mine on comedies which I mostly agreed with, which said that straight up comedies lack depth and have limited appeal. So I entered the screen in a sceptical frame of mind.
Which is probably one of the reasons I enjoyed it. I often find myself setting such low goals for a low expectation movie that they are easily met and so I come out more impressed than I should. In this case however I would say that this didn’t affect my judgement too much, or at least so I hope. There were better jokes in there than I had expected, though there still were some stinkers (in fact, some that I only realised were supposed to be jokes from the space left for laughter in the script, I’m looking at you rival cop duo), and some attempt at character development, though this is no War and Peace. What raises this film above many other passable comedies is the performance of Mark Wahlberg. I love this man.
Playing a parody of many of his former hard cop roles, I found that his angry disillusioned policeman worked well, for most of the film at least, and that the little back story they gave allowed me to fill in the blanks from his character in The Departed and others. Sadly this only works if you have seen Marky Mark’s previous films so can’t really be credited too much to the Other Guys.
All in all it’s a fairly good action comedy that works out better than the trailer would suggest and meets the basic requirement of making me laugh, but it’s not enough to make me a Will Ferrell fan yet and for those of you looking for depth, you’ll probably be disappointed.
