Cop Out, The Other Guys, Predators, Star Trek

I’ve been sick the past couple of days. It was good timing to get sick since my semester is over, so I don’t have any papers to grade or classes to plan right now. In fact, there is no place that I have to be for about three weeks. So I’m glad I got sick this weekend instead of last weekend when I had dozens of final papers to grade. I wasn’t so sick, however, that I could not have done that work if I needed to. It was the type of stomach bug that is no fun, leaving me queasy and tired but no worse than that. The kind of sickness that you can plow through and try to ignore, but if you have the luxury of just taking time off, it’s better to take the time. And I was feeling just ill enough to not even want to do anything as active as reading. So I lay in bed and watched movies.

I wasn’t in the mood for anything serious that I’d have to pay a lot of attention to, so instead I glanced at some On Demand and Netflix options and chose some low-brow flicks that were exactly what I was in the mood for in that state: Cop Out, Predators, The Other Guys, and Star Trek.

Cop Out is an action comedy that has a fair numbers of laughs, thanks primarily to Tracy Morgan, but is also an actual buddy cop action movie with lots of shooting guns and such. My brother watched it recently (also while feeling bad), and recommended it, saying it was a lot like the eighties movies Fletch and Beverly Hills Cop. I think that’s a fair assessment. In general, it was decent, though not one I’d want to watch a second time. I have a few quick comments. One, it’s directed by, but not written by, Kevin Smith, which seems odd since Smith has a lot of funny dialogue in his scripts but is a fairly mediocre director. Two, Tracy Morgan is hilarious and makes the movie worth watching, which I don’t think it would otherwise be. Finally, I was intrigued, but not pulled into the story, by the major event that sets the action in place: Bruce Willis’s character’s daughter is getting married and wants a dream wedding. He can’t afford to pay the $48,000 price tag and doesn’t want to be shown up by the rich new husband of his ex-wife. So his desire to find a way to pay for the wedding sets ups the action for the rest of the movie. I was really annoyed by this. For one thing, $48,000 is ridiculous to pay for a wedding, especially if you can’t easily afford it. I wanted the character to acknowledge how stupid that was rather than do whatever it takes to make it happen. So the whole set up seemed to me to be a non-issue. I wasn’t really invested in whether he would be able to get the money because his reason for wanting the money was idiotic. Furthermore, his stupid macho pride in wanting to do it himself rather than accept the help of his ex-wife’s new husband was a real turn off for me. That kind of pride is a flaw that, were this a tragedy, should lead to the character’s downfall; but since this was a comedy, I was supposed to like the guy, which I didn’t. Maybe I’m reading too much into this, but this big event that I think was supposed to make me sympathize with the character really had the opposite effect for me.

The Other Guys, like Cop Out is a buddy cop action comedy. However, instead of being on that line between traditional cop movie and comedy, this is firmly over the edge in dumb comedy territory (it stars Will Ferrell and is directed by Adam McKay, so it’s what you’d expect from them), and it made me laugh many, many times. Again, it’s the kind of movie I especially like to watch when I’m not feeling well, so it did the trick for me.

Predators also was exactly what I expected it to be. I saw the ads when it came out last year and thought it might be brainless fun, and it was. If you thought from the ads you might like it, then you probably will like it. If you thought it looked stupid, you’ll probably think it’s stupid. I mean, frankly, it is stupid. But it’s got badass aliens hunting humans, so what do you expect?

Star Trek, once again, was what I expected it to be. I had heard that this was much better than anyone expected from a new Star Trek movie, and I suppose I can see what people were saying, though I didn’t feel all that strongly about it. I guess the old Star Trek movies, and the show especially, were really cheesy, and this tones down the cheese quite a bit, but it’s still just Star Trek. There’s nothing amazing or especially thought provoking about it, and it even acknowledges the cheese factor and has fun with some tropes of the Star Trek world. For instance, Kirk is remembered for bedding green alien women, so he does that in the movie. There’s the stereotype of the one random guy in the red shirt who is sent down to a planet with the main characters and who you know is going to get killed, so in the movie there’s a sequence where three characters go on a mission, two are principles and one is a random guy who, sure enough, is wearing red and doesn’t have long to live.

My verdict: big blockbuster action movies and dumb comedies are particularly enjoyable when I’m in the mood to just turn off my brain or when my brain is running at half speed due to illness or exhaustion. So these four movies were a pretty good way to relax and distract myself from my grumbling stomach awhile.