BEFORE: I suppose I could have followed up "S.W.A.T." with "The A-Team", another remake of an old cop show, but then I wouldn't be able to send a Birthday SHOUT-out to Joe Pantoliano, one of my favorite character actors. Happy 60th, Joey Pants! (last seen in "Percy Jackson & The Olympians") Linking from last night's film was rather difficult, but Samuel L. Jackson was in an obscure film called "Fathers & Sons" with Michael Imperioli (last seen in "The Lovely Bones") who has a small role in this film.
THE PLOT: Two hip detectives protect a murder witness while investigating a case of stolen heroin.
AFTER: I know this seems like another "must-see" action flick - one that everyone is familiar with and possibly even enjoys, but I found it hard to follow. The parts regarding the actual police investigative stuff - how the cops tracked down the missing drugs, and the people who stole them from the lock-up, I just didn't get. It seemed like this was a case of all flash and no substance. Geez, even Eddie Murphy did real police work in "Beverly Hills Cop" - he did it with style, but it still got done.
The "hook" here is that the partnered cops are different personality types, one is the free-wheeling bachelor and the other is the uptight married one, and due to a mix-up of "Three's Company" proportions, they have to pretend to be each other when around a witness, because she's been told to trust one of them. And taking 5 minutes to explain the mix-up seems to be out of the question for some reason.
It's not justification enough to hang a storyline on - and it leads to just confusion and bickering among the two cops, as opposed to the bickering they do on a daily basis, or the bickering that they do to confuse perps. My point is, they do a lot of bickering. Don't they say that the relationship between partnered cops is kind of like a marriage? Case in point.
Either I'm burned out by watching too many action films, or else the story here is bare-boned and the characters very simple and under-developed. Problem is, I can't tell the difference anymore - if I lose interest, I can't tell if the problem is with me or the film. I need to take a break just to get back some perspective on this sort of thing.
Starring Will Smith (last seen in "Enemy of the State"), Martin Lawrence (last seen in "Black Knight"), Tea Leoni (last seen in "Switch"), Theresa Randle (last seen in "The Five Heartbeats"), with cameos from Marg Helgenberger (last seen in "Erin Brockovich"), Kevin Corrigan (last seen in "Big Fan").
RATING: 3 out of 10 barrels of ether. Ether?
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