Fridae

Will Ferrell’s brand of comedy has been described as Dadaist by some. I can attest that his most inventively funny flicks (Anchorman, Talladega Nights) have been collaborations with Adam McKay. These collaborations tend to play out as a send-up of an entire genre, with Will Ferrell furiously providing the ad-libbing to create his goofball characters.

In The Other Guys, the old formula is rehashed and made anew once more. The genre receiving the spoof treatment this time is the cop buddy comedy that itself spoofs the cop buddy film. Think of The Other Guys as a parody of films like the Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson version of Starsky and Hutch and you won’t get lost when the comic mayhem starts.

And boy, does it start with a bang. In what might be one of the shortest and most impactful cameos in film, The Rock and Samuel L Jackson play two badass hero cops who always get their man, coming to a very ignominious end. And of course, it’s up to the film’s real protagonists – Hoitz (Wahlberg) and Gamble (Ferrell) – to step into their shoes. But first, they will have to get over Hoitz’s anger management issues and Gambles extreme risk-averse nature in order to solve a crime and apprehend criminals – even boring tax evaders!

Let’s face it. Cop buddy comedies have been done already and plot-wise, The Other Guys doesn’t offer much new from this spoof genre. But that’s not its intention. You may not find yourself laughing at the improbable plot twists, but you will find yourself guffawing over the elaborate, absurd, and completely unexpected humour in both the dialogue and the situational comedy. It’s a level of absurdity that has to be seen to be believed, a series of outrageous recurring gags that shouldn’t work but work better and better each time they pop up on screen.

Will Ferrell, Mark Wahlberg, and Adam McKay clearly have mastered Stephen Chow’s mouleitau style a decade after he stopped making his trademark comedies. To see them transplant mouleitau wholesale to Hollywood, adapt it with their own comic sense, spoof a genre all at the same time and execute it flawlessly is something you won’t want to miss.