Back in February after the release of Cop Out was bombarded with negative reviews from many different critics, director Kevin Smith took to Twitter to explain how reviewers were out of touch with the general movie going populace. His main point (and this is from memory because I am damn sure not going back through all of Smith’s tweets to refresh) was that reviewers did not appreciate the movie for what it was intended to be: a light buddy-cop comedy with throwbacks to its 80s brethen. Less than twenty-four hours after watching a movie that did successfully replicate a lost 80s movie (that would be Piranha, review here), I can safely say that may have been the intention here but a bad movie got in the way.

Taking the old buddy-cop formula, Cop Out does absolutely nothing else with it. Here we have two partners who are loose cannons, destroy things in downtown New York City, get reprimanded and suspended by their captain, and yet continue to investigate a theft and a drug-smuggling ring outside of their authority. As you can tell by that brief synopsis, there is very little original or defining here that you cannot see in the dozens of other buddy-cop movies. In fairness to Smith, Cop Out is not the warning sign of the apocalypse as some reviews might make it out to be. It has its moments but those are mostly contained in the final act, long after any patience you had has worn thin. The biggest flaw is that for a comedy, there is very little humor that does not revolve around Tracy Morgan acting like a ten-year-old or the Kevin Smith standard of dick and fart jokes.

Even though I rather enjoy Morgan in other projects, he is playing the same exact character as everything else I have seen him in. His shtick of a loud-mouthed, self-involved, aggravating manchild works in short bursts on 30 Rock and SNL sketches but only in moderation. Here we have the bulk of the movie where his character Paul is constantly bickering, whining, or just being inept to the point that I cannot fathom how anyone in production thought he could be sold as a cop, let alone one that is a tenured detective. And if there is anything that Bruce Willis can sell, it should be a gruff, city cop but he looks so damn bored here that I could not even buy that.

Aside from the A-plot about Willis’ character Jimmy’s stolen baseball card as it leads to a Mexican drug cartel, both detectives have problems at home as Paul is insanely jealous and convinced that his wife is cheating on him while Jimmy is desperately trying to pay for his daughter’s wedding with the sale of the aforementioned rare and valuable baseball card. Short of the dubious connection with the card and paying for the wedding, these side stories rarely factor into the larger narrative making things incredibly irritating as the already slow progress of investigating is slammed to a halt while Paul cries like a baby over his wife’s alleged infidelities.

Things would have been better served in the movie if the comedic aspect was downplayed while the action sequences were more pronounced. After all, think of other previous cop films like Die Hard or Lethal Weapon which worked as action films with a hint of facetiousness, not reversed. We know that Smith can do comedy damn well but he just was not on his game here so the only time I was not bored silly was during car chases, foot chases, or gunfights. In fact, all of those scenes had very little dialogue which means that we can place some blame on the pair of writers. But Smith should fire himself from the editing duties after this as even scenes or jokes that are threadbare to begin with are stretched to a painstaking length (which almost any scene with Sean William Scott fits here). The child in the backseat repeating others, Paul wearing a cell phone costume hours after it was necessary, a fake phone conversation to talk shit about two rival detectives, and more scenes all began badly but were drawn out to the point of potential self-inflicted harm.

I tried to go into this movie with an open mind as I have reveled in films designated as crap by others before. However, when I am praying for the movie to come to a quick resolution around the thirty-five minute mark, someone has clearly overestimated the entertainment value of bickering and toilet humor.

I was very disappointed in Exorcist II, the obvious follow up to William Friedkin‘s 1973 classic The Exorcist. My aggravation with the movie though is likely different than the rumored reactions of audiences during the film’s premiere. Commissioned by PBF while reviewing Netflix’s awesome Watch Instantly collection, I went into the film expecting it to be quite horrid based on my readings of previous reviews about the film. Normally, I try not to have any preconceived notions about a film prior to watching it as sometimes it can be hard to separate what you’ve heard from what you actually see in the film itself. I am happy to report though that all of the bashers of the film hit it dead on.

Taking place four years after the original, Reagan (played by a remarkably cute Linda Blair) is undergoing psychiatric treatment to deal with repressed memories of her possession. During a really stupid looking hypnosis treatment, she is intertwined with Father Lamont who is investigating the circumstances surrounding Father Merrin’s death at the hand of the demon in the first film. As Father Lamont digs deeper into Reagan’s subconscious (and thus that of the demon possessing her), he finds a clusterfuck of seemingly unrelated plot points and developments with some rather deplorable writing. There may be more to it, but that’s about all I cared to get out of it.

Now, as I said, I expected this to be a horrendous abomination of a horror franchise and a complete failure of a horror film. In the end, I got all of that with the exception of the horrendous adjective. Now, don’t get me wrong. This is a bad movie, probably worthy of a good ripping from the folks at MST3K, but I’ve certainly seen worse films so I was disappointed that this movie just seemed to be incompetently made instead of butchered by a bunch of no-talent ass-clowns as I had expected. I fathom you can’t get the amount of talent on this film without at least starting good. From Richard Burton, Max von Sydow, James Earl Jones, and even all thirty seconds of Ned Beatty, there seems to be a good, or at least passable, movie desperate to get out. Whether this desire was squelched by director John Boorman‘s incompetence (unlikely for a guy nominated for several Oscars), studio tomfoolery, or retooling of the film late in the game remains up in the air. Allegedly though, the only reason Blair appears was due to a contractual obligation to the production prior to heavy rewrites.

Ultimately, the film falls on many fronts. For starters, as a sequel to a quite renowned and genuinely scary movie, Exorcist II had all the scares of a five-year-old’s birthday party. On the film’s Wikipedia page, Boorman is quoted in a mea culpa of sorts stating he did not meet the audiences expectations for a scary follow-up, instead going for a theme of journeys and goodness. In and of itself, this is a notable attempt to create a new advancement of the story without copying the original, but it certainly failed as it should have. Even though the movie may be shoe-horned into the expected horror genre does not mean it has to be a carbon-copy, there just has to be logical thought put into how to do it correctly. There is also the problem of the crazy aspects of the plot that come and go at will and do not add a thing to the story. Reagan has ESP abilities now? Oh well, there is no further expansion except a fleeting line an hour later. Lamont disobeys his orders to fly half-way around the world and meet a guy on a big boulder only to have rocks thrown at him. Yep, that was beneficial. Even the aspect of Merrin being investigated as a Satanist is never really resolved or even mentioned for the final thirty minutes or so. And for a continuation of a movie about demonic possession, I had expected Reagan to relapse and start the head-turning and spewing again or the demon to jump bodies or something. I think there was maybe a total of three minutes dedicated to someone actually being possessed.

Mostly, it seems that almost everything about the original was deliberately cast aside. Instead of a core group of a few characters, we now have a sprawling cast of decent actors with pretty worthless characters. So the original was mostly centered in one house? Let us go around the world now just to learn about the behavior of locust swarms. Now, admittedly it has probably been about six years or so since I last saw the original but I would likely have been less forgiving of this sequel if I had revisited it. So, in the end, we have what has been called the worst sequel ever but certainly not the worst movie ever meaning that I just watched two hours of this dreck for nothing. Instead of being able to make fun of the abysmal acting or story, I was just baffled as to why this movie was green lit in its present state. I hear Exorcist III is a much more worthy follow up so hopefully that will be the case when I get around to that.