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I must confess, I’m rather intrigued by Kevin Smith’s Cop Out. How, exactly, did a big budget movie with a roster of talent like this end up so terrible?  Willis looks sad, bored and tired, Morgan bops and babbles like he’s full of Ketamines, and Kevin Smith doesn’t even seem to have been on the set. Many have been buzzing about the director’s weight fiasco last week, but I say cut the guy some slack. It’s really his new movie that’s the fat, bloated slob.

Where do we begin and who’s to blame? Probably everyone, but as is usually the case, we could start with the script. I’m not the world’s biggest Smith fan, but the trouble starts here with the fact he didn’t write this one himself. I’m not actually sure anyone wrote it, despite the fact we have names in the credits. It feels like they filmed a series of notes scrawled on the back of a coaster at Chili’s by a bunch of guys drunkenly rehashing half-remembered buddy cop movies. In the places where there were memorable chase scenes and witty comaraderie, they just filled it in with actors flashing guns at the camera and Tracey Morgan waxing poetic about his bowel condition.

One is tempted to point an accusing finger at the tired, old formula, but that would be silly. The formula works and it has given us a number of good entries like the Lethal Weapon movies, Rush Hour, and Kiss, Kiss, Bang, Bang (yea, I know they weren’t technically cops). Cop Out just doesn’t seem to understand the formula, and as a result it flails about aimlessly trying to find something to hold onto.

The basics are here; Willis is a divorced cop whose struggling with his teenage daughter, estranged wife and her smarmy second husband. Morgan is his partner, and as the plot requires, also a sassy black man. The potentially interesting twist, that he’s also frightfully insecure about his wife’s fidelity, is smashed into pieces and emerges as the film’s most clueless and wrong-headed attempt at comedy.

The two of them end up embarking on a series of misadventures (or is it misfires?) that pit them against a Latino druglord, an annoying cat burglar who practices Parkour, and the typically beautiful woman on the run from the bad guys. We get scenes of the police chief chastizing their methods and taking their badges, Willis smiling coyly and firing his gun haphazardly in the general direction of the perps, and an extra added bonus involving Morgan tailing a suspect on a kid’s bike while wearing a giant cellphone costume. Hardy har-har.

The cast is surprisingly flat and bland. None of them bring any of what we expect to the table. I usually like Willis, whether he’s going daftly over-the-top (The Fifth Element) or building subtle nuance into his characters (The Sixth Sense). But here, he doesn’t seem to be playing anything. He just stands there, looking forlorn and waiting for Die Hard 5 to pick him up at the bus stop so he can leave the movie. Sean William Scott shows up as the thief, and he’s beyond annoying; he’s mind numbing.  He tries to make that old “guy repeats everything the others say” routine feel like it wasn’t shuttled off the preschool playground. Obviously, he fails. Michelle Trachtenberg as Willis’ daughter and  Rashida Jones as Morgan’s wife are just wasted pretty faces. The villain of the piece is so eye rollingly bad in his role, I’d feel bad singling the actor out. The only one really trying here is Tracey Morgan.

That’s right. Tracey gives the movie his all. He’s approaching the role not as an actor examining a character but as a star trying to outshine the rest of the film. He screams, he smirks, he rails on and on with jokes that weren’t funny when they started, and if the movie had continued I’m perfectly confident he would have eventually donned a tophat, played the kazoo and started moonwalking next to Willis.

I think Morgan can be funny when he has someone who knows how to channel and direct his brand of comedic energy, but here, stranded alone with Willis on lunch break, he goes overboard. The result is like watching a man courageously save a woman from drowning and try to pump air back into her lungs while everyone else watching can see all too clearly she’s long dead.

Finally, there’s Kevin Smith. I cannot see a single mark of his style, humor, or instinct anywhere on this picture. The friend I saw this with commented “If I didn’t know better I’d just assume this was some other Kevin Smith”. He’s right, for as much as it matters to the final result, C.More Butts could have directed this movie; it’s cookie cutter all the way.

There’s really not much more to say. This is a complete failure, albeit there are one or two jokes that almost hit the mark. Worst of all, you could substitute all the collaboraters with unknowns and the result would be the same.  I went into this movie curious, wondering what a cop comedy starring Willis and Morgan  and directed by Smith would look like. Strangely, I’m still wondering.

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Previously seen on Atomic Popcorn