[Image Source: Wikipedia]

Let’s Be Cops is a throwback to a simpler, sunnier, dumber movie era … and that is not necessarily a bad thing. There was a time, not that long ago, when the summer movie season was not so populated with postmodern irony and self-aware/self-important superheroes. Rather, it was an unyielding series of big, silly, high concept buddy flicks like Shanghai Noon or Bad Boys. (This summer’s 22 Jump Street is the exception that proves the rule.)

Let’s Be Cops has neither the wit nor the budget of any of those films, but it is like their not-so-bright cousin: pleasant and nice to hang out with at the family reunion, but ultimately rather forgettable.

Ryan O’Malley (New Girl‘s Jake Johnson) and Justin Miller (Happy Endings‘ Damon Wayans, Jr.) are two friends/roommates who move to Los Angeles to find their dreams after college (Purdue University no less, though both drive cars with Columbus, Ohio license plates – do the filmmakers not know where Purdue is?). These partners in arrested development have hit their 30s and are at a financial/social/life dead end. Think Romy & Michelle’s High School Reunion without the whimsy … or the Post-Its.

Their upcoming college reunion for some reason is a masquerade ball (WTF?) which O’Malley mistakenly believes means a costume party. Miller, a video game designer who is developing one based on real-life experiences of policemen, just happens to have two authentic police uniforms in their apartment. So, of course, they wear these costumes to the party, à la Elle Woods’ cringe-worthy bunny outfit in Legally Blonde. Embarrassment ensues when these boys in blue are faced with college classmates bedecked in evening gowns, tuxedoes, and glittery commedia dell’arte masks (again, WTF?).

The cheekiness finally kicks in when the boys, dejected and mortified by their reunion experience and still wearing their cop gear, wander the streets of L.A. and suddenly realize every passer-by regards them with fear, adoration, respect, or some combination thereof.

Expectedly, the power goes to their heads, and O’Malley starts to take it all too seriously, embroiling them both in a gang bust of some clichéd, B-movie Russian mobsters who are harassing the local pizzeria. (‘Cause of course that’s what Russian mobsters in L.A. would do.)

The film has potential to say something interesting about the abuse of power we see among some uniformed officials – certainly (and sadly) a timely concept. What kind of folks are drawn to this profession in the first place. Is this career-choice motivated by noble intent or a power trip or both? The movie’s script isn’t sharp enough to tackle that concept, which, if explored, could have taken this slight though entertaining film to more interestingly satiric comic levels.

However, the movie is fun. That is pretty much all it has set out to be, and that is just fine, aided and abetted as it is by a well-rounded cast. Any time Rob Riggle shows up (though he seems consigned now and forever to play police officers or gym teachers), you know you’re in good hands. Andy Garcia (!) of all people also makes an appearance, as does James D’Arcy, better than he should have been, saddled with the part of a Russian thug whose primary character trait is chewing (and spitting) gum. Key & Peele‘s Keegan-Michael Key, playing to his broad comic wheelhouse, is a hoot as a wide-eyed, childlike gangbanger.

The leads (Johnson and Wayans) have great, sparkling chemistry. Johnson, who seems like the love-child of Owen Wilson and Mark Ruffalo, is scruffy and charming in all his sweaty desperation to be somebody. Wayans, as his (somewhat) straight-arrow friend, shows surprising range, given the circumstances. He finds more notes to play than actually exist in the thin script, wringing comic gold as a neurotic fish-out-of-water, who is neither as neurotic nor as out of his depths as he initially seems.

Even its artless title is a giveaway that Let’s Be Cops is not taking itself terribly seriously. For all intents and purposes, this zippy trifle is two hours of two little boys playing dress-up in the backyard. Once the high (low) concept rumbles to life, the narrative is an entertaining perp walk to its inevitable credit sequence blooper reel.

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Reel Roy Reviews is now a book! Thanks to BroadwayWorld for this coverage – click here to view. In addition to online ordering at Amazon or from the publisher Open Books, the book currently is being carried by Bookbound, Common Language Bookstore, and Crazy Wisdom Bookstore and Tea Room in Ann Arbor, Michigan and by Green Brain Comics in Dearborn, Michigan. My mom Susie Duncan Sexton’s Secrets of an Old Typewriter series is also available on Amazon and at Bookbound and Common Language.