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TRACY MORGAN and BRUCE WILLIS are two of New York City’s finest in the buddy-cop comedy Cop Out now at  area theaters

By Maggie Scott

Director Kevin Smith is in more trouble than getting ejected from an airline flight for being fat.  He’s not going to be able to be defensive about—or joke his way out of–—the mess that’s his latest movie, Cop Out.  In the hands of a lazy writer, the long-in-the-tooth buddy-cop genre can be numbingly stale.

Two lazy writers, Robb and Mark Cullen, are responsible for the creation of NYPD officers, Jim Monroe (Bruce Willis) and Paul Hodges (Tracy Morgan); partners for nine years in a style their supervisor describes as, “There’s a right way and a wrong way to do police work.  Then there’s your way.”  And, he’s not smiling when he says it, before asking the duo to surrender their badges and side arms.  That’s right.

First essential element of cop-buddy genre: Jimmy and Paul are suspended after shooting up a few quiet neighborhoods in pursuit of a drug dealer’s gang member.  That’s right.  Second essential element of the cop-buddy genre: make the villain a drug kingpin, preferably Mexican. “Po Boy” (Guillermo Diaz) has lost two valuable pieces of personal property: his girl Gabriela (Ana De La Reguera) and a memory stick containing some incriminating files.

Last seen in the trunk of a Mercedes, this property eventually finds its convoluted way to officers Monroe and Hodges thanks to a wise-acre burglar (Seann William Scott) who took off with the rare baseball card Monroe needed to sell to finance the upcoming five-figure wedding of his darling daughter (Michelle Trachtenberg), Ava.  That’s right.

Third essential element of the cop-buddy genre: give the officers domestic issues.  In this case, Monroe is divorced and trying to prove he’s no dead-beat to Ava’s unctuous stepdad (Jason Lee), who has snidely offered to cover the wedding’s cost.

Hodges, meanwhile, is so freaked out at the thought his wife might be cheating on him that he’s got their bedroom staked out with a so-called “nanny cam” stuffed bear. Hodges’ preoccupation becomes a bone of contention between the buddies and one opportunity among many to fulfill the fourth essential element of the cop-buddy genre:  the partners must be affectionately at each other’s throats due to distinct differences in intellect, temperament and style.

Monroe is a bust-heads-first-ask-questions-later rule-breaker with a menacing, moody mug; while Hodges is never far from spastic idiocy, whose verbal antics—most flamboyantly employed during his interrogation of a suspect using various “homages” to film characters—grow old fast.

The movie’s title turns out to be ironic, as the lackadaisical oversight Smith has to the film’s action and actors turns out to be a time-wasting cop-out all its own. A Warner Bros. release, rated R for copious profanity, violence, sexual content.

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