Film Appreciation - A Couple of Dicks

Cody Hamman has a more positive outlook on Kevin Smith's Cop Out than many do, and even has some Film Appreciation for it. 

Cop Out is an anomaly in the career of Kevin Smith, as it's the one feature film he has directed that he didn't write. The screenplay for this was written by brothers Robb and Mark Cullen, and it had been going around under the title A Couple of Dicks for a while by the time Smith signed on. The story centers on a pair of NYPD detectives, "dick" being another word for detective, and it called for one actor to be the more serious, straight man of the pair and his partner to be more of a comedic goofball. At one point James Gandolfini and Robin Williams were up for the lead roles, at another Mark Wahlberg and Will Ferrell considered doing it - but in the end, the roles went to Bruce Willis and Tracy Morgan.

This project was basically an experiment for Smith, and not just because he was working from someone else's script. He had directed television written by others before this, and would go on to do a lot more of that.  And although he wasn't involved in the writing of the script, he was familiar with the Cullens, having had an acting role in a pilot they wrote called Manchild. His biggest curiosity here was to see how the finished film was going to be sold. This was his first time working with a major studio, Warner Bros., and he was interested in getting a front row view of how the studio marketing machine works. He had also been a longtime fan of Bruce Willis, who he had worked beside as an actor in Live Free or Die Hard and wanted to work with as a director. This turned out to be one of those "careful what you wish for" situations, as Smith found working with Willis to be miserable - and while he regrets speaking out about it now, soon after Cop Out was released he let it be known how difficult it was.

Cop Out did sort of mark the end of an era for Willis's career. Up to this point, he was still working on big, high profile productions... but the year after this movie was released, he shifted into working primarily on low budget, straight to video projects. There have been major releases here and there throughout the years, like A Good Day to Die Hard, G.I. Joe: Retaliation, the RED movies, and the Death Wish remake, but for the most part he just shows up in video releases... and he does a ridiculous amount of them. This was also around the time in his career when Willis stopped putting any effort into acting; since this, he has mostly been sleepwalking through movies, just acting like Bruce Willis. Smith could see this lack of effort, interest, and enthusiasm on the set of Cop Out, which was part of his issue with Willis. As he has said, Willis "wasn't there to play", he felt Willis was just there to be grumpy and collect a paycheck. So when Sylvester Stallone had a falling out with Willis on an Expendables movie and called him "greedy and lazy", it really seemed to go along with what Smith had to say about him, and what you can see from him in most of those direct-to-video movies.

Morgan, on the other hand, was definitely there to play. Getting to work with him again (he had a small role in Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back) was Smith's joy on this movie and the thing that got him through the entire production. His love for Morgan is very apparent in the movie, and the actor is completely unleashed - he delivers the lines necessary to move the story forward and get his character's point of view across, and then he tosses out a hundred ad libs that are absurd.

The story the Cullens crafted is a buddy cop comedy of errors that begins with detectives Jimmy Monroe (Willis) and Paul Hodges (Morgan), who have been working together for a long time, attempting to bust a gang that has been smuggling drugs into the city. Their bust goes so terribly wrong that they get suspended for thirty days without pay... which is a major issue for Jimmy, because his daughter Ava (Michelle Trachtenberg) is planning an extravagant wedding that's going to cost $48,000, and Jimmy is too proud to let his ex-wife's new husband Roy (Smith regular Jason Lee, bringing smarmy magic to just two scenes) pay for the event. His only option is to sell a pristine 1952 baseball card he has in his possession, a rare card that is said to go for upwards of $80,000. But his attempt to sell the card goes terribly wrong, too.

The card is stolen by Dave (Seann William Scott), who in addition to robbing hobby stores also likes to do parkour to break into houses, where he always makes sure to take a dump in people's toilets while robbing them. Dave sells the card to baseball enthusiast Poh Boy (Guillermo Diaz) - who also happens to be the head of the drug-running gang Jimmy and Paul were trying to bust! Desperate, Jimmy... and Paul, who is always by his side even though they're no longer on duty... agrees to retrieve a stolen Mercedes for Poh Boy in exchange for the card, not knowing that there's information in the vehicle that will allow Poh Boy to expand his business. And also not knowing there's a live, bound woman - Gabriela (Ana de la Reguera), the mistress of a rival Poh Boy had murdered - in the trunk of the car.

So there's a whole lot going on, and I didn't even mention the 11-year-old car thief, the Russian lawyer, antagonistic detectives Hunsaker (Kevin Pollak) and Mangold (Adam Brody), or the subplot about Paul worrying that his wife Debbie (Rashida Jones) is having an affair.

Cop Out has an awful reputation and I'm not here to say it's a great movie, but I do think it's better than its reputation makes it appear. It's a fine, middle-of-the-road movie with some entertaining moments and characters. There are some fun performances in here, even with Willis trying to drag things down. The humor doesn't always work for me, but Morgan, Scott, Pollak, and Brody, as well as "guest stars" Susie Essman, Fred Armisen, and Omar Capra, do keep the laughs coming at a steady pace. Action isn't Smith's strong suit and it's not particularly impressive here, even with Final Destination 2 director David R. Ellis handling second unit, but I did appreciate the climactic gunfight. (And since the gunfire-heavy Red State was Smith's next movie, maybe he used this as training ground for that as well.)

The Cullens' script got positive attention before the film went into production and the movie might have turned out better with someone else playing Jimmy Monroe, but I can't see any other director making a better movie than this with the resources that were at hand. Smith assembled a great cast around the guy who didn't want to play, and leaned into the fact that he was working in a sub-genre that was perfected in the '80s - so much so that he even hired Harold Faltermeyer, the composer best known for his work on Beverly Hills Cop and Fletch, to provide the score.

Any director could have made Cop Out, but not every director would have cast the movie as well as this version of it was (Willis aside), and who else would have gotten a Faltermeyer score for it? Maybe no one... which is why Kevin Smith's Cop Out is being covered in a Film Appreciation article. He had a rough time making it and it didn't go over well, but I'm glad it exists.