Crime and Punishment

It's criminals and cops this week, as "A Prophet" goes on too long and "Cop Out" is short on chemistry.

Some of the later scenes in “A Prophet” look like they came from other movies, but in Kevin Smith’s new film, “Cop Out,” all the scenes come from other movies. That’s because the film is a broad send-up of mismatched buddy cop movies of the 1980s, complete with the bickering, wisecracking partners played by Bruce Willis and Tracy Morgan, to the hard-ass captain who asks for their guns and badges, to the cheesy synth-pop score by “Beverly Hills Cop” maestro Harold Faltermeyer.

Smith doesn’t hide the influences, he makes them part of the film right from the get-go, when Morgan’s Paul Hodges strong-arms a suspect using a litany of intimidating quotes he’s lifted from his favorite movies (“Nobody puts Baby in a corner!”). This, Paul insists, is not stealing. It’s homage.

Smith, of course, knows a thing or two about homage. As the director of “Chasing Amy” and two “Clerks” movies, he also knows a thing or two about workplace buddies who kill time on the job quoting “Star Wars.” But that doesn’t mean the director is on completely familiar ground; “Cop Out” marks his first time helming a mainstream Hollywood production and directing someone else’s screenplay. It was written by Robb and Mark Cullen, and it follows Brooklyn cops Paul and Jimmy (Willis) as they try to scrounge up enough money to pay for a lavish wedding for Jimmy’s daughter’s while serving a 30-day suspension for a botched undercover job.

Few would have predicted, given his preference for memorable dialogue over memorable visuals, that if Smith were to give up half his gig as a writer/director it would be the writing half. If you offered me the choice to watch a film Kevin Smith wrote or a film Kevin Smith directed, I know which one I would choose. And, not surprisingly, no one will ever mistake the action sequences in “Cop Out” for those from the better movies that inspired them.

But Smith’s always been a good director of actors, and here he gets very funny performances from Tracy Morgan and especially Seann William Scott who, playing a demented criminal who steals a valuable baseball card from Jimmy, walks away with every one of his scenes and basically the entire movie with a hilariously unhinged, tweaked-out performance.

Morgan and Scott need to work hard to keep us entertained; Willis is practically somnambulant in his role. You cast someone like Willis in a movie sending up ’80s cop flicks with the expectation that he’ll tweak and riff on his performance as the ultimate ’80s cop, Detective John McClane from “Die Hard.” But Willis isn’t having fun with his old persona, or his new persona for that matter, which means Jimmy, the character whose actions and desires motivate the entire story, is basically a non-entity and his rapport with Morgan never quite clicks. In these sorts of movies, the chemistry, even if it’s antagonistic chemistry, between the two leads of buddy cop flicks is just as important as in a romance.

The film begins with Paul and Jimmy’s ninth anniversary as partners, where they jokingly refer to themselves as an old married couple. But like a lot of old married couples, whatever spark existed between Jimmy and Paul has long since fizzled out. Jimmy’s not flustered or bemused or enraged by Paul’s antics. He’s totally indifferent, magnifying the fact that although action comedies are usually driven by the cops being mismatched, the actors playing them shouldn’t be.

In mixing comic set-pieces with action set-pieces, “Cop Out” treats Jimmy and Paul as equal parts badasses and goofballs, a dichotomy that can be tough to pull off (see almost every movie that’s tried it, except “Hot Fuzz”). Most of the films that inspired “Cop Out,” from “48 Hours” to “Midnight Run” to the first “Lethal Weapon,” have a lot more bite — racial tension, physical violence between the partners, talk of suicide, threats of retirement. “Cop Out” is comparatively breezy, content to coast along on Morgan’s wild card charisma and Scott’s livewire energy. Save a few dirty jokes, it doesn’t have any of the edge of its predecessors — edge that I can’t help but feel it would have had more of, if the screenwriter had been named Kevin Smith.

“A Prophet” opens in New York and Los Angeles on February 26th before expanding into limited release on March 5th; “Cop Out” opens wide on February 26th.

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