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6 Unlikely Or Perhaps Mismatched Comedy Duos

The comedic “double act” is a concept that has been around for at least a century, first gaining popularity in the vaudeville halls at the turn of the last century, and continuing to be implemented through the comedy generations right up to the present. It’s a ploy often used on the presumption that two opposing forces, when forced to collide, can in the best cases result in explosive, uproarious comedy. We’ve seen the likes of comedy duos Laurel and Hardy, Abbott and Costello, Brooks and Reiner, and Wilder and Pryor team up to produce memorable acts and classic movies. The gimmick has spilled over the borders of pure comedy to inform a genre specific to the medium of film in the years since—that of the buddy cop genre.

4) The Other Guys

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I liked pretty much everything about The Other Guys except for the actual movie. The idea of Mark Wahlberg playing the straight man to Will Ferrell’s comedy, the comedic angle towards corrupt financial markets, and the promise of really offering a true parody of the cop genre were all appealing before the movie. And they’re the parts of the movie I remember when I look back on it fondly. But I also sort of remember not being all that drawn in for the majority of the film, which tends to indicate a movie that’s well written and contains a lot of cool ideas but is not quite executed well enough to leave a lasting impression.

Part of this may be due to expectation, or the potential for Ferrell and Wahlberg to really click, which, for me at least, just didn’t seem to be the case in the finished movie. There were moments that were really perfectly realized, and many others that felt flat. I think when Wahlberg plays incredulous he’s usually good, like in I Heart Huckabees, or when he’s just playfully crass, like in The Departed. But in movies like Ted and The Other Guys, the seams in his comedy work show a little too much, the effort put into gag moments being a little too obvious to completely work. And so this is why I thought more of the weight should have been on Ferrell’s capable shoulders rather than Wahlberg’s. He could have been more like Ryan Phillipe in MacGruber or something. I don’t know.

For a movie with such promise, casting these two actors with enormously different styles, it got muddled too quickly and dragged too long. Critics who liked it seemed to say they preferred Ferrell and Wahlberg to Bruce Willis and Tracy Morgan, which is pretty much the definition of damning with faint praise.

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