Film Review: Will Ferrell, Mark Wahlberg Partner in Cop Farce ‘The Other Guys’

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CHICAGO – While a cop film take-off is filed under the fish-in-a-barrel category, writer/director Adam McKay manages to spin some absurd gold threads into the thin blue cloth. In other words, Will Ferrell and Mark Wahlberg are damn funny in this all-in cop farce, with enough familiar co-star support to prop up the whole enchilada.

Rating: 3.5/5.0

The film opens with the most heroic detectives in New York City, P.K. Highsmith (Samuel L. Jackson) and Christopher Danson (Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson) chasing down another suspect. The chase is their usual over-the-top do or die street race, ending up with a leap into a tour bus, which they end up commandeering. The bust puts them again on the front page, with more honors from grateful Manhattanites.

Back at the station, Highsmith and Danson accept the accolades from their colleagues, including the “other guys,” partners Terry Hoitz (Mark Wahlberg) and Allen Gamble (Will Ferrell), detectives who are assigned to their desks. This particularly galls Hoitz, a man of action, forced to desk duty because of a weapons incident at a World Series game. Gamble is content to ride out his assignment, because he doesn’t rock the boat.

Opportunity knocks for the other guys when Highsmith and Danson go on one chase too many, and die in action. Hoitz and Gamble beg their superior, Captain Gene Mauch (Michael Keaton) to follow up on a suspected kidnapping involving financier David Erston (Steve Coogan), which leads them into a rabbit hole of investment corruption and slow motion shoot outs. This barely gives time for the straitlaced Gamble to spend time with his wife (Eva Mendes) or for Hoitz to keep stalking his old girlfriend (Lindsay Sloane).

Continue reading for Patrick McDonald’s full review of “The Other Guys”

Making the Collar: Will Ferrell as Gamble, Steve Coogan as Erston and Mark Walhberg as Hoitz in ‘The Other Guys’ Photo Credit: Macall Polay for © 2010 Columbia TriStar Marketing Group

Continue reading for Patrick McDonald’s full review of “The Other Guys”