The most recent collaboration between comedian Will Ferrell and writer/director Adam McKay (Talladega Nights, Anchorman, and Step Brothers) is a stereotypical action adventure movie about an odd couple of N.Y.P.D cops. One is a take charge tough guy played by Mark Wahlberg, and the other is a nerdy desk mammal played by Will Ferrell. They are known as the Other Guys as opposed to The Popular Guys who are played by Samuel L. Jackson and Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. Those Guys specialize in the types of car chases and action packed machismo you see in run of the mill superhero/cops movies. Wahlberg, relegated to being Ferrell’s partner because he accidentally shot Derek Jeter, bemoans his sorry existence and takes it out on his partner. He calls Ferrell a “fake cop,” kidnaps him at gunpoint, hijacks his Prius and they both head out into the world to fight crime like The Popular Guys. Can Will Ferrell man-up and stop being such a pussy? Watch and find out!
The most recent collaboration between comedian Will Ferrell and writer/director Adam McKay is a sly social commentary that isn’t as much a parody of regular cop movies as it is a veiled insult to the entire demographic the earlier paragraph (and this movie’s marketing campaign) would appeal to. Out on the beat fighting petty crime, Ferrel and Wahlberg stumble assbackward into something much bigger. The only problem is that they have no idea what it is. It involves a sleazy Wall Street type played by Steve Coogan (Hamlet 2) and a huge investment bank named Llendl Corporation. Llendl’s company motto is “Were into Everything.” Wahlberg persistently assumes that drugs are involved. But as the movie points out, he only does this because he’s an idiot. It is the Will Ferrell character that figures out that they are witnessing a $32 billion dollar theft from unwitting investors in order to make solvent the huge investment bank. (In contrast, that high speed chase involving the Popular Guys at the beginning of the movie achieved nothing but the arrest of a couple of Jamaican’s selling marijuana). The Will Ferrell character is routinely bullied by the other cops (Rob Riggle amongst them) and called a pussy, a queer, a bitch, and several other epithets. His Prius, which gets great mileage, is also routinely derided for its unmanliness. This is all done in Ferrell/McKay style. So the insults are clever and we are invited to laugh at Ferrell. But then the movie’s plot does something quite extraordinary. It gives Ferrell’s character a smoking hot wife played by Eva Mendes and has him almost single-handedly solve an enormous crime that has as much complexity as the scheme in “Chinatown.” So was it wrong to laugh at Ferrell? Am I the idiot for having done so?
The most recent collaboration between comedian Will Ferrell and writer/director Adam McKay is an absurdist comedy where realism is abandoned at every whim in order to get laughs. This is most evident in the presence of several ridiculous characters. One is a mild-mannered police chief played by Michael Keaton who moonlights at Bed, Bath, and Beyond and inexplicably quotes song lyrics from TLC. Another is Dirty Mike and the boys, a gang of homeless men that like stealing Priuses and having orgies in the back of them (“Soup Kitchens” I believe they’re called). There are also a host of very funny comic situations like a whisper fight at a funeral, Ferrell’s back-story as an accidental pimp, and the deaths of the Popular Guys via mind-blowing stupidity. Finally there is plenty of funny dialogue, the best of which is an argument about whether a lion or a tuna would win in a fight. The big question though is whether you can still take a movie seriously once the writer/director casts himself as Dirty Mike. Does Adam McKay want us to think? Or is this all for shits and giggles?
Perhaps this movie’s biggest fault is that it is intent on being all three movies. This makes the movie feel like it is constantly interrupting itself. Near the end when one of the movies becomes a little more interesting than the others (for me it was the social commentary) it seemed like a distraction when it changed course again. The parts of this movie are all very good, but there are too many parts and makes the movie seem overlong at points. This is a small complaint though. I would rather a movie gave me too much than too little and there is quite a lot here.
Given the movies that Will Ferrell and Adam McKay have collaborated on, one might get the impression that they specialize in portraying arrogant alpha males behaving badly, but that would be an oversimplification. Alpha People are entitled to be arrogant to a certain degree if they actually know what they’re doing and are better at it than most people. What Ferrell and McKay are particularly good at conveying is Overconfidence. They know inside and out the type of guy who acts like he’s Alpha without actually being better. This type of guy is oftentimes confused with the Alpha Male because, at first impression, they both display a stunning amount of confidence. But there is usually a way you can tell them apart. In my opinion the main giveaway is if the guy equates his ignorance and stupidity with being manly. For example, it is common overconfident man-knowledge that the manliest beer in the bar is always the worst tasting god-awful swill you can find. Now if you knew anything about beer you might confidently point to a better brand. But it certainly takes more confidence to adamantly proclaim that the worst is the best. You may even go so far as to say that anyone who likes his alcohol to taste good is a pussy or fag. By the way, just the act of calling a guy a pussy is also very bold. Pussy, as we all know signifies feminine traits. So to call a guy a pussy in a derogatory sense is like insulting every woman in the room. If the main goal of your night out drinking is to get laid it should follow that you wouldn’t go out of your way to insult women. BUT, wouldn’t it also signify the enormity of your self-confidence to do exactly that and then be as forward as possible. I mean only someone who is truly better than other people, an Alpha Male, could get away with that sort of thing. So the logic goes around like this: You aren’t better than anybody. But to give the impression that you are better, you do something incredibly stupid because only a truly better person could afford to get away with it. And people do fall for it. Take for example, the death of the two Popular Guys. If they had actually survived their idiocy (which action movie stars do all the time), would you think they were stupid or badass? Why are some women attracted to bad boys? I mean that’s just retarded.
This line of logic leads to the sort of hilarious idiocy that is on full display in Ferrell/McKay comedies and especially in “The Other Guys.” The NYPD is full of officers that take macho pride in cracking down on petty crime while their very livelihoods are being put into risk through complicated financial schemes they find to boring and faggy to understand. A $32 billion theft is huge, but nobody besides the Will Ferrell character cares about the case. The Other Guys are ordered to turn over all the evidence to SEC, only to find out that the SEC agent is also the lawyer of the Wall Street scumbag he is supposed to be investigating. I assume that the makers of this movie we’re angered by the Wall Street fiasco of the past years. They wanted to make a movie about it but, at the same time, wanted to stay true to their chops of action/comedy. So in effect, what we have here is a subterfuge movie like Blood Diamond or Quantum of Solace. The audience walking into the theater has been promised silly action and comedy. The movie delivers on this promise but has an ulterior purpose. In this case: veiled ridicule for society’s idealization of ignorance. Of course the funny thing about making fun of overconfident people is that they won’t ever admit they’ve been insulted. They take the insult and brag about it. You can trick them, insult them, and laugh at them all you want but you will never win the argument. Take that Wall Street.
Oh and by the way, Ferrell and McKay are huge pussies by having the safe, competent accountant married to an incredibly hot doctor. I mean she actually likes him and there is even a comic riff about them having great sex which apparently they enjoy equally. What fags.
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