BEFORE: Wow, this film has been on Netflix for four years, which I don't think is typical for an average film. I thought the standard window was two years, but now I guess that's for films made by other production companies, so it's true, the platform favors their own films, ones produced in-house or made exclusive to their service. Without exclusive distribution rights, this would have scrolled off Netflix and popped up on Tubi or Roku or Freevee by now.
I guess it's been on my list all that time, but honestly I'm not sure, I don't keep notes on how long something's been on the secondary watchlist. How many other films have I got there that I've just back-burnered, with no real intention of getting around to watching them, so they're just taking up space? This is why I have a cap on the size of that list, it's 325 for a reason, so it doesn't become impossible to figure out where to go next, but also there's enough material for me to make the connections between any two films if needed. 225 on the main list, that gives me 550 films to put in order at any given time, it just feels right.
David Alan Grier carries over from "They Cloned Tyrone".
THE PLOT: Twelve-year-old Kareem Manning hires a criminal to scare his mom's new boyfriend - police officer James Coffee - but his plan backfires, forcing Coffee and Kareem to team up in order to save themselves from Detroit's most ruthless drug kingpin.
AFTER: Yeah, it also feels right that this wasn't a high-priority comedy - it serves a purpose for me here as part of "Black Lives Matter" week, but still, it's been a weird mix of issues for sure - shootings by cops, time-travel, civll rights, African warrior women, aliens and clones? I'm all over the place, but still there's some kind of commonality threading through it all, even though I've jumped around from NYC to Detroit, with stops in London and Dahomey. There's a method to my madness if I say there is.
Don't really know what to make of this one, with its 99% corrupt Detroit police force, the well-intentioned interracial relationship that's so volatile it seems like it's going to erupt at the drop of a hat, and the foul-mouthed black teen who won't let some white cop date his mother, and also decides to do an x-rated rap about his teacher in front of the class for some reason. It's like this movie kept aiming the comedy lower and lower, like some weird game of limbo. It's just never classy, and that kind of makes it hard to watch. Is it worth sifting through all these family dynamics and watching a well-meaning white cop get into more and more trouble, until at one point he's technically a fugitive himself, wanted on suspicion of kidnapping and murder?
They really wanted to make his situation bleaker and bleaker, until he'd need to resort to desperate measures to prove to the world that he's not corrupt, when in fact he might be the only cop in Detroit who's NOT working with the drug dealers. Yeah, umm, great message there, only how did the film get approval to film in Detroit? (Ah, but they didn't, it was mostly shot in Vancouver except for one exterior location...). And it looks like it was released a few months into the pandemic, July 2020, when most people had larger things to worry about then the tone of one action comedy.
Ed Helms, of course, is great at playing a screw-up, he kind of made a whole career out of it, well-meaning guys who can't help digging themselves into larger and larger holes, more complicated situations no matter how they try and fix things. You want to root for that guy, but also you want him to kind of wise up and realize how the world works, most of the time. I'd be curious to find out if that's the only kind of character he gets offered, or he's made it a point to only choose the hapless, clue-less guy who always means well but makes every situation worse.
The film is equal parts painful and funny, and I guess that's a stylistic choice, but it's not really one that I want to support, I guess. I mean, you just know that that James Coffee and Kareem are going to end up on the same page, whatever they do is going to bring them closer together in the end, but does that have to include a strip club, a couple of drug dens, a seedy motel where they handcuff his mother to the toilet and then a big shoot-out with drug-dealers at the steel mill? Just wondering. Well, at least they really went for it, whatever "it" turned out to be.
A ton of NITPICK POINTS tonight, but they're already listed on the "Goofs" page on the IMDB, so there's little point in me mentioning them all here.
Also starring Ed Helms (last seen in "I Do...Until I Don't"), Taraji P. Henson (last seen in "Think Like a Man Too"), Terrence Little Gardenhigh, Betty Gilpin (last seen in "The Tomorrow War"), RonReaco Lee, Andrew Bachelor (last seen in "Greenland"), William "Big Sleeps" Stewart (last seen in "Good Boys"), Chance Hurstfield (ditto), Serge Houde (last seen in "The Perfect Score"), Eduard Witzke (last seen in "The Predator"), Diana Bang (last seen in "The Interview"), Erik McNamee (last seen in "Horns"), Samantha Cole, Terry Chen (last seen in "Come and Find Me"), Garfield Wilson (last seen in "Game Over, Man!"), Arielle Tuliao, Jag Bal, Sylvesta Stuart (last seen in "Killing Gunther"), Ryan Robbins (last seen in "Reasonable Doubt"), Ian Hawes, Jesse Hutch, Jason Jordan.
RATING: 4 out of 10 pieces of cornbread
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