The Other Guys: Summer's Best Comedy

Even if you don't like Will Ferrell, you'll laugh
By Evann Gastaldo,  Newser Staff
Posted Aug 6, 2010 11:30 AM CDT

Despite a few reviewers who think it’s basically an extended Saturday Night Live sketch, The Other Guys snagged a high score on the Tomatometer—and some are calling the Will Ferrell/Mark Wahlberg cop comedy the funniest movie of 2010:

  • If you’re tired of Ferrell's typical “clueless blowhard,” never fear: director Adam McKay “shrewdly varies the formula," making Ferrell the “square” and Wahlberg the “aspiring alpha dog,” writes Joe Williams in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. “The Other Guys is the funniest movie of the year.”

  • Ferrell and McKay "have collaborated on three other movies, but they've never been so slyly funny as they are in The Other Guys, a buddy-cop satire so hilarious that even longtime Ferrell haters (me) can't resist it,” admits Connie Ogle in the Miami Herald. “The humor is that rare perfect balance of broad and satiric.”
  • Fun cameos include “Samuel L. Jackson and Dwayne Johnson in a hilarious send-up of badass cops,” and Michael Keaton, who nearly steals the show “as an emasculated police captain moonlighting as a retail store manager,” writes Joshua Katzman in the Chicago Reader.
  • Rather than a full-length film, “the movie’s best bits would stand alone nicely on YouTube, or on Funnyordie.com, the comic video boutique of which Mr. McKay is an owner and where he sometimes dabbles in short-form hilarity,” writes AO Scott in the New York Times.
(More The Other Guys stories.)

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