Let's Be Cops (2014)

Let's Be Cops is one joke. The entire film is one joke over and over again. You see there are lots of movies that follow this rule, it's fairly common among the lower brow comedy films. Actually, one of my favorite comedies follows this logic, Dumb and Dumber. The joke is "look at how dumb these guys are" everything revolves around that one joke but man does it work. In Let's Be Cops the joke is "look at how they aren't cops.... but they're wearing uniforms!" honestly it works at first.... then it very quickly starts to drag on. I'll get into more detail lower but I want people to know that I will be having spoilers in this so if you care don't read on. If you have not seen it, but really, don't.

"Look! They're cops and they are chasing women! So funny"

The film starts with Justin (Damon Wayans jr.) and Ryan (Jake Johnson) in a diner talking. We learn through boring exposition that they have moved to L.A. to try to make it in the entertainment world and have yet to make any head way. Justin works at a video game company as an intern and Ryan was in a herpes commercial that payed 11,000 dollars which he has been living off of. Justin has been working on a game called "Patrolman L.A.". He of course bought some LAPD uniforms to do research with. After having his video game idea shot down, in a scene that people who know anything about current video games will find funny, he returns home to find out that he and Ryan will be going to a party that night and need costumes. They debate costumes and after a minute of debate we have a title... "Let's Be Cops!" Ryan yells.

"But we don't know how to be cops!"

The concept could be funny with a powerful script but as they go through the movie the novelty of guys dressed as cops smoking weed and telling people to stop walking because they can wears off.  Granted, this type of comedy isn't really in my wheel house but I swear I only laughed once every few minutes and it's not like they weren't trying, jokes and visual gags were a plenty they just never really hit. A scene that stands out is Justin, now called Officer Chang, searching people by making them dance. People in the audience were laughing as he instructed them to twerk. Still an unfunny comedy, not that rare, no this film goes beyond that. It attempts to be an action comedy.

The action is awful. It's really some of the worst, unnecessary, boring action I have seen on film. What makes it worse is that the action kicks in during the last 10 minutes. It, of course, starts with the obligatory "suit up" scene. What baffles me is that there are tons of guns shown yet they each only bring one pistol with one clip, both run out of ammo instantly. A perfect example where this is done right is in Hot Fuzz, which I would have much rather watched.

The cast in Let's Be Cops is strong and the acting is pretty good. It's just to bad that the director and editors must not have known what they were doing. Scenes go on for to long and sometimes feel like they were completely unneeded. It's a poorly crafted film. It's not very funny. The action is awful. So what's the good?

Rob Riggle

I give this film 4 real bullet proof vests out of 10.

Divergent (2014): A dystopian clone

Divergent is the newest teen fiction book to get the Twilight treatment. I understand why they keep making this style of film, after all, the film companies are making money hand over fist. I am sure that this movie will be no different. Divergent is good, don't get me wrong, it's far from high theater but its a decent little film. Needless to say my review will have some spoilers, nothing major but be prepared for it.           

I went into Divergent thinking it was going to be a piece of crap. The trailer and commercials really didn't do much to tell us the story or anything about it. All I knew was that it was based around a 16 year old girl and the world is all kinds of screwed up. In reality it's a dystopian future story about class system warfare. I really didn't get that from the little bit of trailer but yeah... very very Hunger Games-esque. It's easy to see why this film was chosen to be made at this time, it really follows the beats that the Hunger Games set. Weak female protagonist who is a teenager, budding teenage romance, dystopian setting, strangely set up class system that the film doesn't really explain, the inability to use a god damn tri-pod and of course the mediocre action scenes.

This movie has the worst fighting style ever.

The basic story is that in Chicago lives “Tris” (Shailene Diann Woodley), a 16 year old girl who has to choose a caste. She takes a test and is told she is DIVERGENT (ohhh that's where the title comes from!). Which we, as the viewer, don't really know what that means but apparently it gets you a one way ticket to deaths-ville. The person administering the test tells her of this then gives her no more information, leaving Tris, and us completely in the dark. Even after seeing the movie, I don't really know what being divergent means, it seems to give you the ability to shoot stuff and throw knives but I digress. They say that those who are divergent can't be controlled, but they really don't show us how these other people are being controlled so it doesn't make much sense. She picks the black and red clan that specializes in war and peace keeping and they also teach free running for some reason. She starts to get trained by this hunky drill instructor type guy named “Four” (Theo James) and of course they start falling in love instantly. The plot comes into it's own when she learns that someone is trying to over throw the faction who runs the political aspects of their society.

What it does well is world building. I understand that this film is the first of (shockingly) a trilogy and all three have already been green lit and the actors have all been attached for their roles throughout the series. It does a good job of laying some ground work for the next few movies but there seems to be this tend in films where they don't feel the need to tell you everything that is going on. It's the future and bad stuff went down, even though we don't know what happened we know it had to be bad because most of Chicago is destroyed. There's no explanation given which pissed me off. Honestly dystopian films from yesteryear at least had the decency to give us a damn text scroll at the beginning. I understand that less is more sometimes but man, who gives a flying fuck that a 16 year old girl is falling in love when we can see the story of how Chicago fell.

I'm pretty sure the writer came up with these based on Magic: The Gathering mana types.

What the film doesn't do well is the script. I know it's based on a book so the blame falls mostly on it for the crappy script but man... it is bad. Lines that are cringe worthy and explanation of scenes that we have just seen (or sometimes while it is happening), this doesn't make for an enjoyable experience. This movie spoon fed its audience to a very large degree. Film makers need to not be afraid to let the intelligence of the audience do some of the obvious work for them. Let us put a few of the pieces together ourselves. The actors didn't make or break it for me, they all did an okay job. The special effects were okay, looked like a good amount of green screen but nothing to crazy.

All in all this film was pretty okay. It didn't do anything really wrong besides be written poorly but it didn't really do anything right either. I predict this will be a big box office smash, much like The Hunger Games. After all this is really just a clone of an already mediocre film.

6/10 Clans that are based on Magic: The Gathering cards