“Paul, did you just punch a little child?”
“There’s things you don’t know about me, Jim, I’ll fuck a little kid up if he kick me in the dick!”

I seem to be a strange Kevin Smith fan, though perhaps in fact that’s the norm. Like the bulk of his fans, I love his most early and iconic work, the Jersey trilogy of Clerks., Mallrats, Chasing Amy and from there the other of his works set in the “View Askewniverse” – Dogma, to a lesser extent Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back (meh, it’s fun), and most recently the surprisingly brilliant Clerks II. And I’m among the very few who actually think Jersey Girl was one of his best – a genuinely moving homage to John Hughes with some of the best performances he’s had in any of his films.

Where I get strange is: I really felt like he dropped the ball when it came to Zack & Miri Make a Porno …stepping on the heels of the Apatows that came before and producing something that, while it had its moments, felt distinctly un-Smith-like. At the same time, however, I’ve found myself enjoying the heck out of the even more culturally insignificant SModcast that he produces… and even all the spin-offs thereof (Tell ‘Em Steve-Dave, Mo & Glo, and Highlands: A Peephole History).

That long intro isn’t just to pad this review. It’s kind of there to clarify just how odd it was, then, that when I heard about Cop Out – the first movie Smith has directed that he didn’t write – my expectations weren’t entirely shot to pieces. At the risk of sounding like the kind of fanboy I really dislike… the more you appreciate Smith’s recent attitude and philosophy toward life that comes over in its purest form in his podcasts and tweets, the less inclined you’ll be to pick this movie apart for the relative waste of time it really is.

For me, it’s far from the great nod to old 80s actioners that I hoped for (the great Harold Faltermeyer of Top Gun and Beverley Hills Cop even does the score), but it still made me laugh a heck of a lot (Scott taunting Morgan in the car, Essman abbreviating her language in front of her son while waving a gun around, then cussing the heck out of the following scene; the aforementioned son’s altercation with Morgan that ends in the line I quoted above…), even when I watched it a second time to refresh my memory before writing this.

I’m told the Blu-ray’s “Maximum Comedy Mode” makes the movie an even more enjoyable experience, and I’ll be very tempted to get the disc just for that. I loved seeing Michelle Trachtenberg as Willis’ daughter and Jason Lee as the stepfather rivalling for her admiration, and there are nice little casting surprises elsewhere in the movie like Kevin Pollak, Seann William Scott and Curb Your Enthusiasm’s Susie Essman (being, as there, wonderfully shouty).

This is by no means to say the movie’s great. Kevin Smith is capable of far more than this and while it can be argued that maybe he’s simply peaked and has the right to enjoy making a simple movie like this, I simply don’t believe it. I hope either Red State or Hit Somebody (which he says will be his “greatest movie” and possibly last) outdo everything we’ve seen from him so far. But I can’t be too down on him… SModcast alone has given me hours of laughs over the last year or two, and in those Askewniverse films I genuinely believe he has probably already done quite enough.

Tags: baseball, buddy movie, comedy, cops

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 5th, 2010 at 4:49 am and is filed under 3 hearts, Movie Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.