{"id":5616,"date":"2010-08-06T00:01:18","date_gmt":"2010-08-06T04:01:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.regrettablesincerity.com\/?p=5616"},"modified":"2010-08-06T00:30:08","modified_gmt":"2010-08-06T04:30:08","slug":"5616","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/regrettablesincerity.com\/?p=5616","title":{"rendered":"The Other Guys"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"Screaming non-sequiturs at the top of your lungs will only get you so far in life. If you\u2019re Will Ferrell, it can get you a financially successful, but poorly made, one-note comedy like Stepbrothers<\/em>. The fatal flaw of Step Brothers<\/em><\/span><\/a> is that Ferrell and John C. Reilly spent their time bellowing profanity at each other at the beginning of the film and never stopped. That no one thought it might be funnier to start out quietly and then build to the shouting is unfortunate; it meant that there was no set of ground rules to bounce off of, no straight man to be the juxtaposition to the wacky.<\/p>\n

In Adam McKay\u2019s cop-buddy parody The Other Guys, <\/em>there are no ground rules and Ferrell is his own straight man, as his partner played by Mark Wahlberg seems to have no idea how to roll with the improv punches. Ferrell begins The Other Guys <\/em>as an introverted nerd and builds his way to, well, a confused nerd, who occasionally shouts.<\/p>\n

\"\"As is true with other McKay\/Ferrell films (Talladega Nights<\/em>, Anchorman<\/span><\/a>, Step Brothers<\/em>), a coherent narrative is way down the list of priorities, it\u2019s more important for Ferrell to throw out his standard non-sequiturs (\u201clion tastes good, let\u2019s go get some more lion,\u201d \u201cand the children all got pinkeye\u201d), and hope the other comedians can play along. That can work with some of the players in The Other Guys<\/em>, specifically Rob Riggle, as an arrogant and thoughtless cop who instructs a classroom of small kids that if you want to stay out of trouble, \u201cit\u2019s best not to be black or Hispanic.\u201d<\/p>\n

But Riggle has only a few minutes of screen time, most of the non-Ferrell moments involve Wahlberg hemming and hawing and getting perpetually angry about being belittled by his co-workers for not being a particularly slick police officer. Wahlberg has only one mode as an actor, the petulant teenager, and it\u2019s further exposed by the Mckay\/Ferrell style of just letting the camera roll until somebody says something funny. No matter what Ferrell or co-stars Michael Keaton or Steve Coogan do, Wahlberg pouts and rants. It\u2019s one of the many reasons that The Other Guys <\/em>falls off the rails pretty early on.<\/p>\n

\"\"That there\u2019s not much of a sense of pacing or continuity in The Other <\/em>Guys is unsurprising, that\u2019s going to happen if you show up on the set and throw out nonsense, hoping it will stick, not worrying about the consistency of tone from scene to scene. It\u2019s why this expensive ($100 million) movie looks terrible, the color scheme changes from shot to shot, characters disappear for long stretches, and why it feels like there\u2019s been hours cut out of the movie. As always with a McKay\/Ferrell production, there is no discernible difference between the outtakes and what made it into the movie.<\/p>\n

That Ferrell\u2019s patented random hostility rears its head early is another stumbling block, there\u2019s a very confusing subplot where this mild-mannered milquetoast is incredibly hostile to his wife, there\u2019s been no set-up or preparation for their discussions or his behavior. This might all work if The Other Guys <\/em>were funny, but with all the bizarre outbursts, it plays like a rambling toddler making loud noises, hoping you\u2019ll laugh.<\/p>\n

\"\"The only truly funny moments in The Other Guys<\/em>, at least after the first \u00bd hour, are the closing credits. It\u2019s not that we get the standard credit bloopers, but rather a completely serious financial lecture using animated graphics about how corporations rip off the public and how monopolies hurt the economy. Keep that in mind when The Other Guys<\/em>, a Sony film, comes to Blu-ray, a technology that Sony owns the patent on.<\/p>\n

Note: An abbreviated version of this reviews appears in this week’s issues of the Germantown Chronicle and the Mt. Airy Independent.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Screaming non-sequiturs at the top of your lungs will only get you so far in life. If you\u2019re Will Ferrell, it can get you a financially successful, but poorly made, one-note comedy like Stepbrothers. The fatal flaw of Step Brothers is that Ferrell and John C. Reilly spent their time bellowing profanity at each other […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,10],"tags":[5188,325,776,6835,3173,6831,4571,622,1845,389,6839,153,6830,6837,3143,6836,4084,1918,1991,6829,27,4354,6834,4600,763,359,6833,140,6828,4424,1684,5189,6838,3135,1847,262,192,4186,6827,1182,6826,6832,441,6364,282],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/regrettablesincerity.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5616"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/regrettablesincerity.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/regrettablesincerity.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regrettablesincerity.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regrettablesincerity.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5616"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/regrettablesincerity.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5616\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/regrettablesincerity.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5616"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regrettablesincerity.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5616"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regrettablesincerity.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5616"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}