COP OUT

One word springs to mind after watching the abysmal Cop Out: piecemeal.  Everything from the story to the acting to the soundtrack seems cobbled together out of incongruent parts, to the point where you can practically see the clumsy, uneven seams holding it all together.  Given the big name talent involved, there's really no excuse for it.

 

Jimmy Moore (Bruce Willis) and Paul Hodges (Tracy Morgan) are unlikely police partners, though you'd be hard-pressed to label them good cop/bad cop.  Instead,  Paul plays idiot cop (randomly quoting movies and making perps question his sanity), while Jimmy coolly shakes his head and smirks as if to say, "Oh pshaw. What are we going to do with you?!"  Looking at them, you wonder how they'd ever accomplish anything, and indeed, it doesn't appear that these two have much on the ball.  Jimmy doesn't have the money to pay for his daughter's wedding, and Paul lives in constant fear that his hot wife (Rashida Jones) is cheating on him.  In order to save his pride (and preserve the relationship with his daughter), Jimmy decides to pawn a very valuable baseball card.  Unfortunately, he finds himself smack dab in the middle of a robbery.

 

It should come as no surprise that Jimmy and Paul are useless when it comes to thinking on their feet, so they are quietly invited to leave the case alone.  Ah, but they can't!  Jimmy needs his card back, and it would be nice to prove to their department that they're not complete nincompoops.  And so this convoluted adventure begins, and all along the way you have to remind yourself that Jimmy and Paul are still after that baseball card and the drug kingpin who wound up with it.  As they noodle about with an annoying trash-talking robber (Seann William Scott), a pint-sized car thief,  and a kidnapped woman (Ana de la Reguera), it's hard to believe it could be that simple.

 

Indeed, Cop Out couldn't be simpler, but it's about as easy to follow as Tracy Morgan's train of thought.  The entire movie seems like a showcase for his random comedic riffs, some of which make more sense than others.  I can't say I never cracked a smile, but Cop Out proved to be little more than an incoherent waste of time.  The matter of the baseball card and the wedding money never seemed terribly urgent to the people in the movie, so there's little reason to get worked up about it while watching on your couch at home.  Worst of all is the soundtrack, which sounds like a cheesy Harold Faltmeyer knock-off even though it was composed by Faltmeyer himself.  It's a clear attempt to create a buddy cop movie in the vein of the 80's classics, but it seems no one involved bothered to rub the sleep out of their eyes before setting to work on it.