Cop Out

Jimmy (Bruce Willis), a swinging-dick career cop threatened by his ex-wife’s new husband (Jason Lee), tries to sell a treasured baseball card so he can pay for his daughter’s wedding. That plan goes awry, thanks to interventions from Seann William Scott, a thief, and the scene-swiping Guillermo Diaz as a textbook Mexican movie gangster with an atypical baseball obsession. Jimmy and his partner, Paul (Tracy Morgan), have no choice but to Break All the Rules. Director Kevin Smith (who didn’t write Cop Out; this is the Clerks auteur’s first feature-length work for hire) soon swerves into smarter territory: Determined to prove his bad-cop “acting” chops to a skeptical Jimmy, Paul interrogates a perp by subjecting him to an unrelenting marathon of movie-character impersonations. And so Cop Out announces itself as a loving homage to “everything on cable” and as a sly subversion of genre. It’s a movie that shamelessly traffics in the clichés of other cop movies while also engaging both characters and audience in the sport of catching those references. Cop Out works as well as it does — it works exponentially better than it should — because the movie-trivia game is played smirk-free, with palpable joy from everyone involved.