Netflix Minute: The Other Guys

Netflix Minute is a weekly feature highlighting a title from Netflix's catalog of instant view films. If you want to spend a night snuggled up with a bag of popcorn and don't want to drive to the video store, this is for you.

Comedy is a fairly tricky genre to contend with nowadays, especially with so many well-exploited sub-genres like college sex comedy or romantic comedy. Making a truly unique one is no simple task, which is why The Other Guys feels so refreshing before the question of "well how funny is it though?" even hits the table.

The premise of the film is quite simple. Two desk jockey cops played by Mark Wahlberg and Will Ferrell (Terry and Allen, respectively) are under constant fire from their fellow officers for being worthless. On the flip side, the two superstar cops played by Samuel L. Jackson and Dwayne Johnson hunt down bad guys in crazy gun fights and car chases every day, relegating their paperwork to our witless anti-heroes. Taking his financial forensics background into account, Allen manages to stumble on a minor offense for a prominent businessman that turns out being one of the biggest cases to hit the NYPD and their chance at being the big cops on the block.

What really makes this film great is the perfect mix of Lethal Weapon and Anchorman that make up the framework. Wahlberg and Ferrell have an incredible amount of chemistry as the down-on-his-luck cop who made one big mistake and the lowly geek who's looking for some purpose. At the same time, all of the characters in this film are exaggerated in some way, whether its the alternately toughie/softie police chief played by Michael Keaton or the ridiculously modest, self-deprecating wife of Allen played by Eva Mendes.

Beyond that, the gags have a great element of randomness while not straying too far like many other contemporary films. The tendency to devolve into totally unrelated tangents is quite prevalent, with many comedies exploiting their ability to jolt the viewer out of the experience and observe the absurdity of a situation from a more external standpoint. The Other Guys does explore its fair share of references to other pop culture elements, but the characters inside the experience are often aware of the strange nature of such dialogue and respond in logical yet amusing ways.

Not everything was fantastic in this film, but the good writing and performances did go a long way to make up for any faults. As is the case in many sarcastic, unrealistic comedies, the plot is almost incomprehensible in spots and difficult to follow in others. While this doesn't really take away from the great moments sprinkled throughout, it would have been nice to have a thread to follow from beginning to end. Ultimately, the abundance of these moments resulted in a very entertaining film nonetheless. Even if you have no affinity for Will Ferrell or don't understand how Mark Wahlberg can pull off a comedy, The Other Guys deserves a fair shake.