Cop Out (2010)

Cop Out arrives in 2010 as a buddy-cop spoof assembled from parts so familiar they may as well be stamped with inventory numbers. Bruce Willis plays Jimmy, a veteran detective who needs cash for his daughter's wedding. Tracy Morgan plays Paul, his unpredictable partner. A rare 1952 baseball card goes missing, a drug lord named Poh Boy collects memorabilia, and the two men go rogue without backup except each other. The film was written by Robb and Mark Cullen and directed by Kevin Smith, who did not write it, a fact he has since discussed at length. The whole enterprise carries the faint exhaustion of a genre parody that has forgotten what it was parodying.

On the matter of social consciousness, the record is thin. Morgan anchors as co-lead and the supporting cast includes Rashida Jones, Guillermo Diaz, and Ana de la Reguera, so the ensemble is notably multiethnic. Nothing in the script comments on this. It is casting, not consciousness. Women occupy three stations: the wife suspected of infidelity, the daughter whose wedding drives the plot, and Gabriela, the gangster's captive trophy kept in a car trunk. The lone nod toward any queer content is a gag in which Paul's wife stages a fake affair using her gay cousin to provoke his jealousy. That is the entire contribution. The film preaches nothing, critiques nothing, and has no interest in the environment, the body, the mind, or the historical record. Its closest thing to a thesis is a mild suggestion that family outranks money, delivered at a wedding where a man is held at gunpoint so the protagonist can walk his daughter down the aisle.

What remains is a broad, gag-driven caper that critics savaged and audiences shrugged at. The humor is crude, the pacing slack, and the cultural footprint slight. For the purposes of classification, we find a film that is aggressively of its moment and entirely without message. It wanted only to give some cats some fun laughs.