Cop Out - The Filthy Critic

This week:
Cop Out

Filthy says:
"Even Kevin Smith's shits are lazy and easily pleased!"

I don't care how many orifices you have, Cop Out will fuck you in all of them. Your ass, mouth, nostrils, between your toes. You got pierced ears? Expect to find director Kevin Smith's dick in them before you get out of the theater. Doing that requires a shitload more accuracy and effort than he put into this monumentally lazy, bowel-voiding turd of a movie. Don't pay money to see it. Treat it as my first-grade teacher had the other students treat me when I wet my pants in class: put it in the corner, ignore it and denigrate it until it goes away in shame.

Cop Out is fucking abysmal and a violation of many international laws so long as you consider the audience as prisoners. And they are. At its core it's an unoriginal retread of the cop-buddy formula that wore out its welcome a decade or so ago. Smith calls this an "homage" to the flicks of his youth, but that's a pantload. First, an homage should be flattering and respectful. Second, an homage should be a way to shine a light on the best of what's come before, not an excuse to recycle the most overused elements without putting any effort into updating or reinventing them. Smith's idea of homage is to beat the material like a teen boy's dick until it can no loner stand up.

In Cop Out, Bruce Willis is the white cop, Tracy Morgan is the black one. They get suspended from the force for being renegades on a drug case and must then solve it on their own. Yes, they are suspended by a hard-ass supervisor who demands their guns and badges. That's not because of homage, it's because nobody involved in making this flick bothered to come up with a new way to show it. That would have taken effort. The suspension comes right before Willis's daughter is about to get married and he needs to work to pay for the lavish ceremony she wants. Paying is his way of showing her how much he cares. It's also his way of sticking it to his ex-wife's rich new husband. To make up the shortfall caused by the suspension, Willis must sell an old baseball card that has schmaltzy sentimental value. Except, Ho! Ho!, the card is stolen by a crazy thief (Seann William Scott) who then trades it to the same drug thief they were already trying to catch. Isn't that clever. There's a shit load of other details that neither make sense nor add to the story, including a Mexican cartel kingpin's mistress in the trunk of a car, the frequent, unamusing reappearances of Scott, and a pointless side plot about Morgan suspecting his wife's cheating on him.

While there is nothing original or clever in Cop Out what separates it from other unbearably shitty flicks is just how little care and effort went into making it. I'll break my bitching into two pieces. The first will focus on the sloppy bits of moviemaking. The second will detail the lazy and trite bits.

Toward the end of the movie there is a shootout at a bad guy's house that is, apparently taking place at night. Or so it would seem from the outside. Yet, inside, the bad guy is terrorizing a woman while sunlight streams through a window behind him. That sort of gaffe is almost understandable, though, since Cop Out has no sense of time. A scene during the day suddenly turns to night, or vice versa, a couple of times without a dusk or dawn or any indication of the time of day. In a motel room scene where it looks like Bruce Willis is trying to escape the movie, he stands by the door for a long time. The latch behind him magically goes from closed to open back to closed. This isn't a fucking Ed Wood movie. This is a piece of shit Warner Brothers expects us to pay $10 a head to see. Yet nobody could fix shit like this? Or, rather, no editor, director or producer cared to? Fuck all of them.

When Willis and Morgan are suspended from the force, they turn in their shit. Yet, for no apparent reason, they keep the police car, which they drive around for the rest of the movie. Why the fuck is that? Later, the two, while on suspension, arrest Scott for, it appears, excessive flop sweat. He's thrown in jail. What Cop Out never explains is how two suspended cops can handcuff a guy, torture him, then have him jailed without any civil liberty lawyers--or the police department itself--declaring bullshit. It's left strictly to us in the audience to do it.

Scott's character is supposed to be comic relief, but I can't figure out how. He is loud and crass, and mimics Morgan. He doesn't do anything more than an obnoxious third-grader. Thank God, third graders grow up. The character is written to sound clever but appears phenomenally retarded and capable of making decisions that only really shitty moviemakers in a hurry would. He is a thief who does a daylight robbery of a shop. Next, he cat burgles a house, that for some reason willis and Morgan are tipped off to. How? God only knows. Scott's an expert at Parkour, but also a hardcore drug addict who trades the valuable baseball card for extreme narcotics, which we never see and never see him use. Nor do we ever seen him in need of them, or reacting to them.

Cop Out's characterizations and plotting are as sloppy as a fat girl sleepover in an ice cream factory. The entire plot pivots on Willis' needing to quickly raise $50,000 for his daughter's wedding because he has been suspended from the force for 30 days. Is Cop Out telling us is that New York cops make $600,000 a year? Or is it telling us that Smith and his writers didn't fucking bother to reconcile its lazy attempts at characterizing Willis? I'd say the latter since beyond that the movie doesn't bother to give that lousy actor any personality beyond a bunch of ham-handed smirking. Hey, Bruce, you're an old fucking man, you're no longer cool and you're not some fraternity prick hoping to date rape an insecure freshman.

Morgan is zany, and that's about it. He's outsized, loud and expected to perform on demand. He has his useless side plot in which he suspects his wife, Rashida Jones, is cheating on him. Of course, she isn't. She certainly would be justified, though, since Morgan spends about two minutes of screen time with her. The movie never establishes that their marriage is worth saving, or that he is remotely a good husband. He gets much more pleasure for nickels and Willis's smirks. Worse, it fails to integrate this story into the larger plot. His story feels like the bad writers' lazy stab at giving Morgan characterization beyond being the sassy black guy, and failing.

One of the hallmarks of cop-buddy movies is that the cops don't like each other at the start. For some reason Cop Out doesn't bother with this. Willis and Morgan have been partners for nine years and get along fine. I'd give credit to Smith and the monkeys-wirth-typewriters team of Robb and Mark Cullen if they replaced that usual source of conflict with something else. They don't. They follow convention to a "T" and rely heavily on hackery for their plot. Yet, for some fucking reason skip the main source of conflict in the movies they are ripping off. Hell, as long as you're making a shitty, hack movie, you might as well make a shitty movie with some element of tension.

Other characters trotted out for the cheapest of laughs are a foulmouthed, gun-toting mother and a foulmouthed ten-year-old who steals cars. In the case of the latter, the potty-talking kid happens to show up right where they look for him and have the information Willis and Morgan need to find a stolen car. No, the kid didn't steal it, but according to Cop Out, all the car thieves in New York discuss their latest heists with each other. Good fucking Lord, that sort of easy presumption is what makes shitty screenwriters so fucking shitty. Crap like that is so much easier than thinking up something plausible. The movie's gang of bad guys is as lifeless and stereotypical as a CW sitcom. The leader, conveniently, collects baseball memorabilia--oh, and hits his victims with batted balls. I could see that crap in a direct-to-foreign-video-cocaine-era Jean Claude Van Damme, but it's really fucking weak for a major studio release. Nobody involved bothered to flesh anything out.

Overall, the plotting of Cop Out feels about as authentic as a Mentos commercial, but without the excitement. The pacing is slack, the action scenes flat-out incompetent. Characters come and go by convenience, not logic. There is a scramble to find a stolen Mercedes (which is easy to do, apparently). Willis and Morgan get it, but it's not the car people are after. See, there is a beautiful woman in the trunk. Yet, it's not the woman anyone's after either. It's a thumb drive she carries. The girl and the car are just imbecilic red herrings, as though they are how anyone with half a brain would try to smuggle a tiny flash memory card. There are multiple shootouts where, despite many shots fired, nobody gets hurt. That is, until the climactic one when, all the sudden, Willis and Morgan become crackerjacks. Their every shot not only hits the target, but instantaneously kills it. Fucking lazy moviemaking assholes.

The attempts at comedy, when not tedious and based on what cracks up stoners and eight-year-olds, is uncomfortably inappropriate. There are two points where someone dies and that's the punchline. A guy smacks his head on a concrete wall and dies. High comedy. A gag like that is humor as understood by people who tortured cats as kids and would do it to humans now, if they ever got the courage to leave their mother's basements. Other jokes are nowhere near as funny as they could have been with more polish, effort and restraint.

I could go on and on about the shitty laziness and incompetence of Cop Out: the by-the-single-digit-numbers direction; the awkward pauses; the gaffes; and the labored, drawn-out dialog. Hopefully, though, you get the point. That is, this is one fucking shitty piece of crap that needs to be ignored and shamed until it goes away. I can only hope it puts the final nail in the crummy career of the fat-ass, under-talented and over-persistent hack Kevin Smith. He's a fucking blight. One Finger.

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