The Other Guys get by

FILM REVIEW

The Other Guys
DIRECTED BY: Adam McKay
STARRING: Will Ferrell, Mark Wahlberg, Michael Keaton, Samuel L Jackson, Dwayne Johnson
CERT: 12A

If you were unfortunate enough to have your mind and good taste assaulted by Cop Out, Kevin Smith’s latest journey through the dark recesses of his stunted psyche, you may have mourned the sad passing of the buddy-cop genre and possibly even have placed some flowers on its grave.
Presuming, of course, that your soul is not already hardened to modern Hollywood’s crimes against its own heritage.
But it looks like the requiem may have come a little too early. On the evidence of The Other Guys, all is not lost. Not just yet anyway.
Director Adam McKay and Will Ferrell have teamed up to great effect in the past (Anchorman, Talladega Nights) and even managed to wring a few decent laughs recently from Step Brothers, an inferior offering by their standards.
The Other Guys won’t go down as their finest collaboration either but it’s a far funnier movie than most of what passed for comedy over a very poor summer and breathes at least some temporary life into a fine old institution’s corpse.
Ferrell and Wahlberg play Gamble and Hoitz, a pair of desk-bound cops who live in the long shadow of New York’s finest crime-busting duo, Highsmith and Danson (Samuel L Jackson and Dwayne Johnson).
Gamble is a nerdy, repressed old soul who idolises the precinct’s superstars but is happy to stick to the safe paperwork routine and carry a wooden gun. His partner Hoitz is not so content to sit around while the action passes him by;­ he wants to get out on the street and unleash years of pent-up aggression, prejudice and other serious clinical issues.
He gets his chance when Highsmith and Danson make a surprising exit and the mismatched buddies find themselves on the case of a billionaire (Steve Coogan) who’s up to his neck in crooked financial deals with a trail that naturally leads all the way to the top.
Along the way,­ which the boys navigate in a Prius much to Hoitz’s embarrassment, we get to meet station captain Gene Mauuch (Michael Keaton in great form), a man who’d give old Beetroot Ferguson a run for his money in the gum-chewing championship and who supplements his income with a somewhat unmanly nixer.
We also get to know Gamble’s ball-and-chain, Eva Mendes, who proves she’s considerably more than mere decoration, not least in a duet with Ferrell called Pimps Don’t Cry.
There’s some stuff here that just doesn’t work and could have been left on the floor, ­ a number of the gags are lame and the running time could have been shaved even more if McKay had not insisted on an ill-advised attempt at serious social commentary.
But there’s plenty that is funny and some that’s hilarious. Ferrell is always a hoot and he’s on top of his game here even if the role is familiar one at this stage. It’s Wahlberg, though, who steals the show as the borderline psycho Hoitz – who is basically Wahlberg’s trademark tough nut, interpreted with a comic flair that hasn’t exactly been obvious in the past, when we might have paraphrased Tommy Lee Jones from Men in Black, “Ma’am, Mr Wahlberg does not have a sense of humour we’re aware of.”
This is good fun and well worth a look. Oh and the action isn’t too shabby either. Someone’s been watching a lot of John Woo.

Devil
DIRECTED BY: John Erick Dowdle
STARRING: Chris Messina, Jeffrey Arend, Bojana Novakovic, Logan Marshall-Green, Caroline Dhavernas
CERT: 15A

M Night Shyamalan’s pen hasn’t conjured up anything of much worth in recent years and now that it has, the folks who picked it up and ran with it haven’t done it the justice it deserved.
Shyamalan’s idea is a good one a bunch of people trapped in an elevator with an unknown bloodthirsty supernatural entity among them. But screenwriter Brian Nelson and director John Erick Dowdle don’t have the required skills to make that’s story the kind of bone-chiller it could be.
If the characters stuck in the lift were more than cardboard cut-outs, you might have more of an inclination to be troubled when the weird stuff starts to go down.
If Dowdle had a stronger knack for suspense and tension ­ and more imagination than simply cutting out the lights when the boogeyman does his thing, then what happens in these close confines could really have been scary and the final twist something more memorable than it is.
As it is, the film rarely rises above being simply a decent distraction, a fair enough effort that doesn’t outstay its welcome at a short 80 minutes.