Starring: Jake Johnson, Damon Wayans Jr. and Rob Riggle
Directed By: Luke Greenfield
Rated: R
Running Time: 104 minutes
20th Century Fox
Our Score: 1.5 out of 5 stars
What should have been the dumbest plot of the summer actually manages to be not as bad as some of you probably would have thought. I’m talking of course about “Let’s Be Cops” premise that’s based solely on two guys who impersonate police officers and seemingly get away with it. While it’s far from being recommended or up to par with “22 Jump Street”, “Let’s Be Cops” proves that there’s some future potential for the two leads despite the coarse humor they had to deliver.
Ryan (Johnson) is pretty much a bum living in the past. He constantly thinks about the “What ifs” of a football career that ended due to an injury and lives off the $100,000 he got paid for a herpes commercial (By the way, if that’s the price to say I have herpes on a commercial, sign me up). His roommate, Justin (Wayans), is a little better off as a video game developer although he’s anxious about confronting his arrogant boss or standing tall and proud behind his ideas. Ironically, but not really, his video game idea is where gamers can play a cop.
Since he bought real police gear for his failed video game sales pitch, he might as well put it to good. The duo have a college alumni party to go to so they strap on the uniforms and head to the miserable reminder they’re in their 30’s and haven’t accomplished anything. It’s after the party, when they’re in the general public, that they quickly find out that they now commandeer a level of respect they’ve never felt before since bystanders now believe their actual cops. Good thing this is L.A. and not suburban St. Louis. Of course they will have their own trouble once they flaunt their false authority to some mobsters.
Luke Greenfield and Nicholas Thomas have paired up before on some forgettable comedies that temporarily provide a decent chuckle, but overall fail to materialize memorable characters or stable humor. There’s definitely a lot of jokes that can be plucked from such a fruitful concept about two friends pretending to be the boys in blue, but it actually feels like they ran out of ideas after page one and then had to resort to a couple of contemporary comedy tropes like responding to perfectly normal questions with swear words or how smoking pot is just…funny…I guess.
Wayans and Johnson definitely have some chemistry and some of the more funny moments feel like genuine improv on the cast’s part, but a lot more scripted scenes feel contrived. And since this movie clocks in at over 100 minutes, those long pauses of poor comedy and tone changes push the movie past its breaking point. Another saving grace from the abyss is Rob Riggle as the legitimate cop, Segars. I say saving grace because you dream and hope that one day someone as talented and charmed as him will get his own action-comedy.
“Let’s Be Cops” feels like a concept born from people who grew up on “Lethal Weapon” and “Bad Boys”, but didn’t quite understand why those movies were good. Or perhaps the male driven buddy cop comedy movie has run its course and the only thing left to do now is to subvert the formula until audiences are ready to watch two guys with holstered weapons act like a bunch of middle school boys who smirk and laugh at swear words and genitals again.