Michael Keaton (center), as a police captain, pulls a fast gun in “The Other Guys,” with Will Ferrell and Mark Wahlberg. (
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Wall Streeters are a bunch of overpaid ripoff artists, says the guy who earned $20 million or so for “Land of the Lost.”
“The Other Guys” starts out as a hilarious take on cop-movie cliches, then turns into Will Ferrell’s own “Capitalism: A Love Story.” The evident ire of the movie’s tax-code-dull second half suggests motives deeply personal. Maybe Will doesn’t like his ranking in Forbes’ current list of Hollywood’s Most Overpaid Stars, which is No. 1? With his pay equal to $1 for every $3.29 his films take in, he’s a sort of box-office Bernie Madoff.
Ferrell teams with Mark Wahlberg, an NYPD desk jockey aching for a piece of the macho-man action owned by their supercop colleagues (Dwayne Johnson and a priceless Samuel L. Jackson). Allen (Ferrell) would rather stay put and work up a nice scaffolding-permit fine. He got into policing because he was attracted by the paperwork. “At age 11 I audited my parents. Believe me, there were some discrepancies.” His idea of cutting loose is to cruise in his Prius while listening to the Little River Band.
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Wahlberg isn’t a comic (why couldn’t Jack Black or John C. Reilly have taken this part?), and his button-eyed scowling doesn’t make him work as a straight man either. Yet there are several superb riffs in the early going, such as a couple of “Lethal Weapon” spoofs and a fight that breaks out at a funeral where the cops roll around belting each other on the floor — silently, so as not to be disrespectful.
Some of the best gags depend on sharply executed surprise appearances including one by a top athlete and another by Eva Mendes. We learn it’s possible to dance sarcastically, that a lion might have to bow in defeat to a really determined tuna, that you can become a pimp accidentally, and that true love can spring from unlikely places, such as a case of rectal poison ivy. Michael Keaton is the funniest he’s been in years as a police captain who moonlights at Bed Bath & Beyond.
My comedy NASDAQ was on fire.
Then the movie pulled a Lehman brothers. Three and a half stars. Three. Two and a half. My God, could this thing tank all the way to two? Gags start to be repeated, and the least funny ones seem to pop up the most. “I want to fly like a peacock,” Wahlberg keeps saying. For some reason.
The movie, directed by Adam McKay from a script he wrote with Chris Henchy, forgets it’s a comedy and starts burrowing into a convoluted but uninteresting financial scandal involving an evil capitalist played by Steve Coogan. If Coogan has ever been funny in any American movie, I’ve missed it.
Scene after scene delves into bookkeeping details. Crickets chirp. Centuries pass. Then there are slapdash car chases and shootouts. Why exactly does everyone wind up on the driving range at Chelsea Piers? And why is this funny?
“The Other Guys” is the first disappointment from the previously golden Ferrell-McKay team that delivered “Anchorman,” “Talladega Nights” and “Step Brothers.” Now blowing studio money on political posturing, they break laws known to every open-mike night novice by wrapping up with their least funny, preachiest material: A series of graphics illustrating financial-crisis stats meant to inflame the dudgeon of populists, editorial writers and other financial illiterates.
Sorry, guys: The Madoff Ponzi scheme has nothing to do with CEO-to-janitor compensation ratios and neither has anything to do with the financial crisis or TARP bailouts — which anyway turned out to be astute loan backstops and bargain stock purchases.
You see that being a bore is contagious. Ferrell on Wall Street is about as wince-worthy as Timothy Geithner on a NASCAR track, running wild in his tighty whities.
kyle.smith@nypost.com