I'll preface my review by simply stating that I have never been much of a Will Ferrell fan. I certainly have enjoyed some of his movies (Anchorman, Old School, ect.) but really think he is at his best when he isn't called upon to be the main character and is called upon in moderation. I have just never been fond of that over the top style of humor of non-stop outrageous dialogue and that is exactly what you get in "The Other Guys".
As a movie that attempts to bombard you with unrelenting "funny" scenes it certainly has a few funny parts as well as a few gut wrenching hilarious parts. However, as the film attempts to swing for the fences with every joke, it has a tendency for striking out more often than not.
The film presents you with Mark Wahlberg and Will Ferrell as two unpopular police detectives whose prowess for solving cases is nonexistent (makes you curious how they made detective in the first place) and thus mocked all members of the department. To add to their unpopularity, they apparently hate each other. Wahlberg's character apparently knows no volume level below shouting and would seemingly have some deepseeded emotional baggage by the way he relentlessly insults his partner. Will Ferell plays a haphazardly booknerd detective who is supposed to be intelligent yet quirky, though is portrayed to have an aggressive alternate persona stemming from being a pimp. As has become the norm with Will Ferrell, the majority of his dialogue consists of the most random off the wall statements that he could apparently think of... sometimes it works, mostly it doesn't.
The strengths of The Other Guys is certain members of the supporting casts and oddly enough the action sequences which were surprisingly well done for a comedy. It seems that any time Samuel L. Jackson plays a small role in a movie, he has the charisma to steal the scene, and that certainly is the case in The Other Guys. Easily the two best characters in the movie are Samuel L. and The Rock and they also have perhaps the funniest most WTF moment in the entire movie. The biggest mistake that the film makes is that it repeatedly attempts to use the same subpar jokes over and over. I mean really is a police captain dropping TLC lyrics the best that they could come up with??
Overall I would throw in it the heap with the vast majority of Will Ferrell flicks and if you like that style of humor, I'd check it out. But overall, for me, I left the theatre a tad disappointed.
5.5/10
