Nerds That Geek Movie Review: ‘Cop Out’

Written by John Edward Betancourt 

​The old saying ‘you can’t win ‘em all’ exists for one particular reason in that, there’s a lot of truth to that statement. Because sometimes in life, regardless of your magnificent track record and regardless of how much preparation and effort and care you put into a particular task or goal, you will fail and fail miserably and there’s not a single thing you can do about it. Of course, there are individual lessons to be learned when this happens, but in that moment, there’s no way you can be happy about it and after a string of magnificent hits and well-reviewed films, Kevin Smith finally reached his moment of unexpected failure in 2010’s Cop Out.
 
Because let’s not mince any words or bones about this movie, this is a rough film when all is said and done, which was quite the surprise to me when I first settled in to watch it. Because this really did have all the ingredients for a successful comedy, since you can’t go wrong with having Kevin Smith as the man behind the camera, and adding Tracy Morgan and Bruce Willis into the mix were also solid decisions and making it a buddy cop flick seemed like the icing on the cake. But the jokes simply don’t work in this film, and it is the only Kevin Smith movie that I merely chuckled at and well, the failure of this film can be attributed to a couple of key elements.
 
First and foremost, one of the big problems with this motion picture is attributed to the fact that Kevin never quite jelled with his star, Bruce Willis. Because it is now well-known that these two didn’t get along during the production of this film for various reasons that we won’t re-hash here, but the tension between the two is evident on screen. For Bruce’s performance seems detached and bored here, and after you learn of the feud, there are some shots where it seems as though he’s straight up scowling at the camera and that’s a shame, because had these two been on the same page his performance could have been comedic gold, but, what’s done is done and the divide between these two hurts the film greatly since Bruce’s phoned-in performance makes the movie boring.
 
But in all honesty, that particular problem could have been overlooked and forgotten had there been a better script for this movie, which oddly enough isn’t Kevin’s fault in the slightest. For this is the first film that Mister Smith directed that he didn’t write and well, while it’s obvious that Robb and Mark Cullen had their hearts in the right place when assembling this screenplay, the end result leaves a lot to be desired. For the plot in and of itself is pretty messy to say the least and a lot of the moments that should be hilarious fall flat on a consistent basis and well, that only adds to the boredom one experiences when watching this motion picture and really, since the script is the foundation for a film, this is truly what makes this one so incredibly rough.
 
Which leaves me to wonder what this movie would have looked like, had Kevin been given some re-writing power by the studio, and if he and Bruce had found some common ground. But, alas, that kind of pondering does us no good for this is the end result and the sole reason I put little blame on Kevin’s ability to direct something mainstream is based upon his work for The CW’s superhero shows since any time he’s stepped behind the camera there, the end result has always been fantastic. But, as I made mention of at the start of this review, sometimes things just don’t go your way, and that’s exactly what happened here. But, on the plus side, it would seem that this sour experience with a studio flick motivated Kevin like never before since his next project went to some supremely unexpected places.  

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