The Other Guys - SNL at its BEST

The Other Guys

Director – Adam McKay

Starring – Mark Whalberg, Will Ferrell, Micheal Keaton, Eva Mendez with Samuel L. Jackson and Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson

MPAA - Rated PG-13 for crude and sexual content, language, violence and some drug material.

Happy Birthday to me; my aunt took my wife, my brother, and me to this film for a little birthday present. It was opening day, a matinee, and the theater was pretty dead; but this did not stop my aunt and I from busting our guts laughing through this riotous film. I was in the mood for a goofy Will Ferrell comedy and I was not disappointed.

This is the best Adam McKay/Will Ferrell collaboration I have seen yet. “Anchorman”, “Talladega Nights”, and “Step Brothers” were all funny to be sure (all though “Step Brothers” was mostly offensive and awkward) but they all strayed a little too far from reality to be anything more than random SNL movies. “The Other Guys” however manages to take the clever and bizarre dialogue from McKay’s earlier films and combines it with everything good about buddy/cop films to make a hilarious combination of action and comedy. Anyone who loved McKay’s earlier movies will flock to “The Other Guys” in droves, but this movie also will bring in the crowds who are less fond of Will Ferrell because co-starring with Ferrell is the heart-throb Mark Whalberg.



Whalberg is a fun actor to watch and in this film he is given the freedom to mesh his bad-boy attitude from “The Departed” with the goofy absurdness of the SNL style film. Whalberg helps to ground the random humor so prevalent in McKay’s films. So often in the other McKay/Ferrell films there are moments when I would turn and look at who ever I was watching the film with and just shrug my shoulders in complete confusion at where a particular joke or scene was coming from. Sometimes I was so baffled I didn’t even laugh. Most of “Step Brothers” I was just embarrassed. While there are plenty of mind-bogglingly weird moments of dialogue in “The Other Guys” instead of being mystified by the absurdness of the moment I was just caught up in the hilarity and almost peed my pants as a result. The humorous dialogue is so well played out.

The film starts off with action super-stars Samuel L. Jackson and “The Rock” cruising through the city streets blowing stuff up and catching bad guys. These two are the dynamite heroes that everyone loves and they know that their stuff don’t stink. Whalberg and Ferrell are on the sidelines; desk jockeys, who are unappreciated and almost unneeded. Then suddenly the action stars are gone and the two mismatched partners are left to fill the shoes of Jackson and The Rock. Whalberg and Ferrell blunder badly across crime scenes yelling and fighting with each other and of course eventually doing what happens in all cop films – finding the bad guys and becoming great friends while causing billions of dollars in property damage and making the audience roll around the isles laughing.



I am definitely heading back the theaters to see “The Other Guys” again. It is a witty and random comedy that is really the apex of the SNL genre. I love the action/comedy genre when it is done right, and this is an example in excellence...goofy excellence. Yes, this is a random film; and anyone not amused by Saturday Night Live, Adam McKay, or Will Ferrell will probably not appreciate “The Other Guys” or recognize it as anything other than a foolish teenage-boy film. It is a little crude, there is a little profanity, but it is very very funny.



I’ll give it a 7.8 out of 10. I can’t give it much more than that because then I would be suggesting that there was good plot development or other artistic elements of higher quality than that of other films in the genre. That would be misleading. This is not a deep film on any level. It is a long SNL skit but thoroughly entertaining; delivering non-stop laughs.



Sex/Nudity – 5 out of 10 – There are a few sexual references, sexual jokes, and a husband and wife exchange sexual propositions using an elderly woman to deliver the messages. There are a few scenes with women wearing cleavage revealing outfits. A husband and wife disrobe while preparing to have sex, we see her briefly in lingerie and he is shown briefly with his shirt off. A man’s car is stolen, and when it is recovered the police report that it was used for a gay orgy of homeless men. This gag is used two or three other times and the homeless guys are seen later again trying to steal the car.

Violence/Gore – 5 out of 10 – 3 men jump to their deaths in different scenes, we see their bodies hit the ground but there is no blood seen. There are a lot of gun fights, explosions, and everything else you see in a cop movie. There is very little blood. A car runs over a few dead bodies and a little blood spurts out.

Profanity – 6 out of 10 - There are various sexual references, maybe one F-word, somewhere around 100 uses of the S-word, A-word, and other mild obscenities.