Originally published on metropolis.co.jp on September 2010

Cop Out: ©2010 WARNER BROS. ENTERTAINMENT INC.

Jersey auteur Kevin Smith’s latest and most juvenile film is this flaccid buddy-cop opera starring Tracy Morgan and Bruce Willis (zilch chemistry) that thinks it’s way funnier than it is. In this homage to a genre that no one ever really liked, two disgraced cops slog through a forest of bodily function jokes to retrieve a baseball card from Mexican drug smugglers, whom they eventually bust, leading in the end (if you’re still in the theater) to their redemption, yada yada. It’s gutless, irritating and boring. Didn’t crack a smile. This is the kind of moviemaking that Smith (Clerks, Chasing Amy) would once have ridiculed. Sad.