I hope you like prison food. And penis.
The Other Guys was quite silly. Still, I liked it. Probably Will Ferrell’s best film since Anchorman. He played a similar character, which is what he does best.
Will Ferrell’s default position seems to be to play the Dummling. This is a character from fairy-tales, who is simple-minded but with good intentions. They are usually rewarded at the end. In The Other Guys he plays an ex-pimp (he only became a pimp to help out a friend), who becomes a cop in order to control his inner darkness and stay safe. He wants a simple life, he doesn’t want to hurt anyone and he wants to bring financial criminals to justice. The Dummling is a kind-of offshoot of the Clown character, or the Dummy. His cop-character is unintentionally funny, as his colleagues mock him for his endlessly upbeat persona. At the end of the film he is rewarded with the respect of his colleages and the ongoing love of his ‘smoking hot’ wife Eva Mendes.
Ron Burgundy, Ferrell’s character in Anchorman, is similar. He just wants to read the news and enjoy his life. He is unintentionally funny by way of his simple-mindedness (as shown by his tendency to read everything on the teleprompter, even when a mistaken question mark is added to the end of a sentence - ‘I’m Ron Burgundy?’). His downfall is finalised by another representation of his simple-mindedness. He is driven to despair when his dog Baxter is kicked into a river, which leads him to lose his job to his lover Christina Applegate. He is rewarded at the end of the film as his colleagues rescue him from anonimity and he gains their respect as well as the love of Applegate.
Will Ferrell is at his best in these roles. When he chooses to play a different character he loses his charm, which is really what drives his popularity. It’s the simple-mindedness that does it. In Stranger Than Fiction, another good one, he isn’t so much simple-minded but he is certainly an innocent. He is a good person embroiled in a very strange circumstance.
I should counter-balance this with some examples of his bad work, but I can’t be bothered.
The rest of The Other Guys was pretty standard. The plot was nothing to write home about. Samuel L. Jackson and The Rock did a good job at the beginning playing the archetypal tough cops (perhaps the funniest moment in the film was when they both unintentionally killed themselves). Michael Keaton was also excellent as the nice-guy captain who holds down a second job in order to put his bi-sexual son through college (why was his son bi-sexual? Don’t know. I think it was a joke of some sort). His performance brought to mind the police captain played by Alan Arkin in So I Married An Axe Murderer (this character is genius - he is a softy who wants to be the tough, typical captain in order to please Anthony LaPlaglia’s cop, who in turn wants the police force to be how you see it in the movies, rather than the paper-pushing mundanity that it actually is. There’s more police-spoof in that set-up than in the entirity of The Other Guys, or Police Squad, or the two put together). Mark Wahlberg was also excellent.
So, the performances outstrip the rest of the film. Perhaps that’s why it’s managed to get good reviews. To be honest, I had expected it to feel more authentic, but Adam McKay doesn’t seem to have managed that since Anchorman, and perhaps he never will again.
