Something happens to The Other Guys after about an hour. It’s unmistakable. It doesn’t go downmarket, like a lot of American comedies. It doesn’t start to wallow in coarse jokes, like Get Him to the Greek or Hot Tub Time Machine. It doesn’t try to become outrageous. It just becomes flat, losing its momentum. It feels like it’s trying to shoehorn too many ideas into the remaining 50 minutes, so all of them feel rushed. My audience laughed, chuckled or tittered at almost every scene in the first hour, but sat silently through most of the rest. At some point, it almost starts to feel like an ordeal.
The first half is funny, though. Samuel L. Jackson and The Rock (whom I really need to start calling ‘Dwayne Johnson’) are heroic cops – but Will Ferrell and Mark Wahlberg are the Other Guys, also cops but not so heroic. Jackson and Johnson get in car chases, inevitably ending with a huge fireball; the Other Guys sit in the office, doing paperwork. Allen (Ferrell) is happy with this. Other cops call him “paper bitch” and generally disrespect him; “There’s nothing about you that makes a man a man,” says Terry (Wahlberg) contemptuously. Terry used to be a proper cop, at least till he accidentally shot Derek Jeter while policing a baseball game. Derek Jeter is an American baseball star, whom I’ve never heard of. Doesn’t matter; it’s still funny.
Almost everything works in the first scenes. Michael Keaton (his best comedy role in years) is the Captain, though Allen calls him “Gene” much to his annoyance. He (the Captain) also has a second job as a bath salesman, working two jobs “so my son can explore his bisexuality and become a DJ”. Keaton can project edginess without even trying, making the smallest things funny – as, for instance, when he tells the cops to gather round then tells them to back away slightly, going back and forth till he finds the right distance. Meanwhile, Allen and Terry are sniping at each other (Wahlberg plays the whole film with a single Mr. Angry expression). Even “the sound of your piss hitting the urinal isn’t manly,” says Terry; you’re “like a child with a leather jacket,” responds Allen. If we were in the jungle I’d attack you, snarls Terry, even if it meant going outside my food chain; if I was a lion and you were a tuna, I’d swim out to sea and attack you. This brings a long riposte on how, firstly, lions hate water and, secondly, any lion attacking tuna would be hopelessly outnumbered and achieve nothing except giving tuna their first taste of lion, thereby turning them into bloodthirsty, lion-eating carnivores – and meanwhile Terry just stands there looking furious. Funny stuff.
The film hits a peak when Allen invites Terry home to meet the missus, who turns out to be smoking-hot Eva Mendes – but then collapses, starting with a scene when Terry visits his own (ex-)girlfriend at a ballet school. There’s a very subtle line in comedies. Rhythm is important; once the rhythm starts to feel laboured, the audience tenses up and stops laughing. The Other Guys goes off in too many directions, so its rhythm in the second half becomes stop-and-start. Everything in the first hour seems to riff on what came before, but the second hour feels disconnected (we’ve barely even heard of Terry’s ex till we see her at the ballet school). Some scenes – like the ‘college pimp’ story – seem over-extended, others feel too short. Worst of all, there’s a tendency to over-explain: the TLC joke is killed by over-milking, and the bit where Allen admits to his wife that he’s always known she’s sexy, he was just pretending not to notice, ruins a good joke for no reason at all.
Why is quality control so erratic in so many Hollywood comedies? Hard to say. Partly, I suspect, because most practitioners now come from TV, and think in terms of sketches rather than narrative arcs. Partly, too, because they tend to throw in as many jokes as possible and see what sticks, incidentally making most of these films overlong (The Other Guys could easily have clocked in at 90 minutes). Whatever the reason, it’s a shame. There’s a comedy here to rival Anchorman – Ferrell’s biggest hit with director Adam McKay – but they let it slip through their fingers.
