It's an interesting thing; It's difficult to get excited about most comedies nowadays since trailers in general have gotten out of control with how much they give away. This is especially true with comedies because recently it seems that all the funny parts are shown in the trailers, and the rest of the movie is just crap. I was very wary of The Other Guys because of this. The trailers were hilarious, but I thought there was no way the actual movie could live up to it, also because I don't think I'm alone in thinking that Will Ferrell seems a bit played out at this point. Fortunately though, I was proven wrong in this case and had a great time.
The plot sort of takes a back seat to the antics of Will Ferrell and Mark Wahlberg, but in a nutshell the two guys play NYPD desk jockeys Allen Gamble (Ferrell) and Terry Hoitz (Wahlberg) in a characiture of a police station. Gamble is the straight-laced accountant, and Hoitz is the guy with the anger management problem who got stuck behind a desk because of a prior incident. The two hotshot cops on the force (played by Sam Jackson and The Rock (I refuse to call him Dwayne)) get all the glory for having car chases and generally wreaking havoc in the name of the law while the “other guys” (that's the name of the movie!!!) are left to file the paperwork. While doing some of said paperwork, Gamble comes across a minor violation involving some ridiculously rich guy (Steve Coogan), and gets him and his partner involved in a huge financial conspiracy that's way above their heads, and hilarity ensues.
I say the plot takes a back seat like it's a bad thing, but it really isn't in this case. The whole film is really just an excuse to put Ferrell and Wahlberg together in different hilarious situations (get it? because they're polar opposites!). The comedic writing is absolutely brilliant. I haven't laughed that hard in a theater in I have no idea how long. You can tell a lot of it is ad-libbed and you really get the feeling that the two guys get along well and are having a great time doing it. It's also very nice change of pace to get a very subdued Will Ferrell performance. After all of his played-out over the top loud parts, it makes his humor in this movie work even better because it's slightly unexpected. And I feel like this is the perfect role for Wahlberg. It's so funny to see him basically poking fun at his typically tough-guy roles he's been playing of late.
Where it falls flat is in the non-comedic parts. It just seems that director Adam McKay needed to find somebody to help him out writing the dramatic elements, or at least spent more time on it. The comedic stuff pretty much writes itself with 2 very talented guys being very funny with pretty much no effort, so it's a shame to see that not as much love was put into the other plot elements. It's like they couldn't figure out what they wanted to do other than be funny. There are parts that make it seem like it's trying to lampoon action movies like the parts with The Rock and Sam Jackson (which I would have loved to see more of), but then there are parts that seem like it's trying to make some sort of point about capitalism and corporate greed, especially apparent in the ending credits, and it just comes off as out of place. Not to mention that the conspiracy that Gamble and Hoitz get caught up in gets so needlessly complicated and convoluted that it's more like McKay just didn't know what he was talking about so he just decided to just keep stacking crap on top of itself to make it complicated, cause that's how conspiracies work, right? It's kind of a shame really, because if they could have picked a direction, especially if that direction was just lampooning action movies, this could have been the next Hot Fuzz.
In the end though, fortunately it's pretty easy to overlook the shortcomings because, again, of the performances. Even the smaller roles were fantastic, like Michael Keaton's continuous TLC references. While it does end up feeling a little long in the end, mainly because that's when all the side stories that nobody cares about come together, it's still a great ride and you really feed off the chemistry on the screen. On a personal note, I'm really happy to see this sudden resurgence in the action/comedy genre. With the A-Team, Knight and Day, and now this being the best of the crop this year (not saying that either of those are excellent examples of the genre, but definitely steps in the right direction), it's like people are finally realizing what they've been missing. We've been so bogged down in romantic comedies mixed with a little bit of action, and it's just not the same as a Naked Gun or a Tropic Thunder or a Shaun of the Dead/Hot Fuzz. This is another, bigger step in the direction of bringing a horribly under-rated genre back to the forefront.
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