The Other Guys

The Other Guys is a film designed around one central joke - that most police films are action packed thrillers involving drugs and guns, whilst a lot of the most serious crime is white collar cases involving computers and currency transactions. The film tries to bring these two different worlds together, at least one presumes that is the intention from the number of scary statistics over the closing credits. The fact that you need the closing credits to remind you what it was supposed to all be about is an indication that somewhere between that one idea and the finished film, things got rather messier and the actual details of the police case are hazy to say least, and at times almost totally lost in the scattergun approach to humour which is both the film's major failing and biggest success.

Such messiness is almost inevitable when you cast Will Ferrell with his own unique brand of humour. Ferrell here is at his best since Stranger Than Fiction (2006) and his funniest since Anchorman (2004) and gives a timely reminder of how funny he can be with the right material as the forensic accountant who is partnered with Mark Wahlberg's frustrated action man. Wahlberg is a revelation - showing a comic ability that has so far remained almost completely untapped. That said, the film is almost stolen by a hilarious cameo from Samuel L Jackson and Dwayne Johnson as the hero cops. Its a cameo that ends hilariously abruptly, but its almost worth going to see the film just for their sake. Steve Coogan also gets one of his better big screen outings as the financial bigshot at the centre of investigations. Not all the jokes are successful and as mentioned above the plot is hardly worth trying to follow, being little more than a loose structure of an investigation to hang the buddy comedy aroound. That said there's more here that works than doesn't humour-wise.

Overall - 7/10 Its hit and miss, but definitely more hit than miss and thus ends up being one of the funnier films of the year and welcome return to form for Ferrell after a very dodgy patch.