Let's Be Cops
Director: Luke Greenfield
Actors: Marlon Wayans, Andy Garcia
Release Date: Saturday 30th November 2013
Genre(s): Action, Comedy
Running time: 104 minutes
Ryan (Jake Johnson) and Justin (Damon Wayans Jnr) are unhappy with their lot in life, with the former being a star athlete but currently an out of work actor, and the latter a shy video games designer who can’t work up the nerve to pitch to his boss or ask the cute waitress that he likes out on a date. When they dress up as cops for a costume party they get mistaken for actual patrolmen, and while drunk on power they wander blindly into clichéd plot of gangsters and crooked cops.
Writer/director Luke Greenfield was obviously a fan of 21 Jump Street and Ride Along, as all he’s done here is smushed the plot-lines of those two movies together and hoped that would be enough for audiences to find funny. We guarantee you: it’s not. Every conversation in the movie follows the exact same formula:
Jake Johnson: Let’s do something stupidly illegal!
Damon Wayans Jnr: No! It’s stupidly illegal!
Jake Johnson: But it’ll be fun!
Damon Wayans Jnr: (short pause) Okay, you've convinced me!
This applies to when they first dress up as the cops, and then all the way through the film as they buy old cop cars to drive around, start listening in on police scanners to stop crimes, getting involved with a murderous gang headed by an unrecognizable James D’Arcy, smoking meth when undercover… the insanity goes on, but not in a particular fun way. Mostly in a “How stupid ARE you?” kinda way.
Johnson and Wayans Jnr save the movie from being an abysmal mess by buoying the entire thing with the easy-to-like charm, but even they seem lost at sea with a script almost completely devoid of actual jokes. There are lines of dialogue delivered by the actors as if they were intended to be funny, but they’re not actual jokes, they’re just words being said in a humorous manner.
Case in point: Daman Wayans police badge says his name is Officer Chang, so in one scene he puts on an Asian accent. Is that supposed to be funny? We can’t even tell anymore.
