The Other Guys (2010)

Movie quotes:
Terry Hoitz: No, I don't like you. I think you're a fake cop. The sound of your piss hitting the urinal, it sounds feminine. If we were in the wild, I would attack you. Even if you weren't in my food chain, I would go out of my way to attack you. If I were a lion and you were a tuna, I would swim out in the middle of the ocean and freaking EAT you! And then I'd bang your tuna girlfriend.
Allen Gamble: OK, first off: a lion? Swimming in the ocean? Lions don't like water. If you placed it near a river or some sort of fresh water source, that make sense. But you find yourself in the ocean, 20 foot waves, I'm assuming off the coast of South Africa, coming up against a full grown 800 pound tuna with his 20 or 30 friends, you lose that battle, you lose that battle 9 times out of 10. And guess what, you've wandered into our school of tuna and we now have a taste of lion. We've talked to ourselves. We've communicated and said 'You know what? Lion tastes good, let's go get some more lion'. We've developed a system to establish a beach-head and aggressively hunt you and your family and we will corner your pride, your children, your offspring.
Terry Hoitz: How you gonna do that?
Allen Gamble: We will construct a series of breathing apparatus with kelp. We will be able to trap certain amounts of oxygen. It's not gonna be days at a time. But hour? Hour forty-five? No problem. That will give us enough time to figure out where you live, go back to the sea, get some more oxygen, and then stalk you. You just lost at your own game. You're outgunned and out-manned. [pause] Did that go the way you thought it was gonna go? Nope.

Terry Hoitz: Your farts aren't manly.
Allen Gamble: Are you serious?
Terry Hoitz: They sound like a baby blowing out birthday candles.

At a glance:
The Other Guys exploits the cop buddy template to produce some really big laughs, led by the deadpan delivery of Will Ferrell and the raw anger and frustration of Mark Wahlberg

Our review (with spoilers):
Two bumbling cops are teamed up, seemingly just so they can argue all the time. Allen (Will Ferrell) is happy to stay behind a desk and actually volunteers to do the paperwork for the flashier copy buddy teams. Terry (Mark Wahlberg) wants to get out there and be a star, but he’s burdened by his big mistake: while on duty at Yankee Stadium, he shot Derek Jeter, costing the Yankees the World Series. Through a complicated set of circumstances, Allen and Terry latch onto a case that could make or break their careers.

This is a gloriously mismatched buddy teaming. Ferrell gets into a serene nerd zone, while Walhberg is bottled up and seriously angry. If you know a little about Wahlberg’s past, you know that his anger is not acting – it’s behaving – and it feels genuine. And against Ferrell’s comedy deadpan, there’s something hilarious about it.

I don’t think I’ve laughed as hard in months as I did when Allen trumps Terry’s Lion Eats Tuna story with his long soliloquy detailing how he and his school of 800 pound tuna will stalk Terry’s Lion pride back up onto land using jury-rigged kelp to get oxygen. There is also a hilarious scene where Allen and his wife Sheila (Eva Mendez) compare their anal-centric how-did-they-meet story with the supposed anal-centric plot of You’ve Got Mail.

The Other Guys is not perfect. Like many comedies it cannot sustain that high laugh level, and when it gets serious in the second half, that isn’t nearly as much fun. But the laughs that are there are huge, and there’s good supporting comedy work from Michael Keaton and Steve Coogan.

Rating:  3 of 4

Other reviewers said:
"It runs out of steam in the final third but The Other Guys is constantly kept afloat by a grand cast that includes Michael Keaton as station captain Gene Mauch and Eva Mendes as Gamble's smoldering wife Sheila."
- Allan Hunter (Daily Express)

"There's a wealth of joyously berserk idiot humour, fusing slapstick and satire, surrealism and stream-of-consciousness improv into what could well prove the funniest movie of the year."
- Tom Huddleston (Time Out)