Such nonsense! This is a buddy movie, with our buddies played by Bruce Willis ("What Just Happened?") and Tracy Morgan ("30 Rock"). Willis is a passable straight man to Morgan's motor-mouthed loose cannon. They have been partners in the NYPD for years, so any personality clashes have long since been ironed out.
There are three major issues:
- Divorced Willis has to pay for his only child's wedding, and on a cop's pay, it is an astronomical amount. He intends to fund it by selling a rare, museum-quality baseball card, which is stolen early in the movie by Seann William Scott ("Role Models"), who gets very tiresome very quickly.
- Married Morgan is so nuts about his wife, played by Rashida Jones ("I Love You, Man"), that he thinks every other man must be crazy for her too, so he is constantly wrestling with the green- eyed monster.
- While trying to reclaim the stolen card, our dynamic duo inadvertently steps on the toes of a pair of narcotics detectives, played to subtle comic perfection by Kevin Pollack ("Tropic Thunder") and Adam Brody ("Jennifer's Body"), just before a planned raid on a major drug dealer's headquarters.
Much of the violence is cartoonish, but a couple of executions in the drug ring are NOT.
For me, most of the fun was discovering how much profanity I actually knew in Spanish! Where did THAT come from! A misspent youth? One of the characters is a lovely Penelope Cruz look-alike, a hostage played by Ana de la Reguera ("Empire State"), who turns out to be a foul- mouthed spitfire. Although all of her invectives are in Spanish, the sub- titles aren't very literal. Who knew? And Morgan's attempts at Spanish are quite funny!
This will never be a classic, but the audience was entertained...and that's what it's all about, isn't it?
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