Let’s Be Cops is a pretty good “Saturday Night Live” sketch that should never have been turned into a feature-length movie. That would be bad enough, but what’s even worse is that Let’s Be Cops was never even a “Saturday Night Live” sketch to begin with. The whole film is kind of like a Happy Meal toy that doesn’t come free with your food and costs ten dollars too much: so why did they even put it out at all?
Damon Wayans Jr. and Jake Johnson play 30-year-old losers who find themselves wearing cop uniforms after a costume party gone awry. On their way home they discover that people look at them differently, and actually listen to what they have to say. Drunk on power, they begin to take advantage of people around them to bolster their fragile egos. They walk into nightclubs for free, order around all the a-holes in their neighborhood and confiscate all the marijuana they want.
It’s monstrous, but also funny so long as Let’s Be Cops keeps their shenanigans innocent. These are powerless schmucks cutting loose for the very first time, mimicking the clichés they remember from TV and peacocking through the city like they own the place. The catharsis is understandable, even amusing, but when they run afoul of actual criminals and Johnson actually starts taking his “job” seriously, they run into far more trouble than they can handle.
Related: Watch an Exclusive Scene from ‘Let’s Be Cops’
And at this point, the heretofore sporadically funny Let’s Be Cops starts rapidly sprouting problems. It runs into a hackneyed formula at full speed and just keeps going, suddenly and erroneously thinking that it’s now a real movie instead of just a delivery system for disjointed situational comedy. The jokes keep flying, and sometimes they actually get a few laughs, but by the time Damon Wayans Jr. gives a speech about how terrifying real-life violence is while Jake Johnson dodges real gunfire across town, it becomes clear just how far off-base Let’s Be Cops has gotten. It thinks it’s earned the right to take itself seriously, and nothing about its mediocre production values or limp character development actually backs up that assessment.
Let’s Be Cops isn’t truly a terrible movie, and it’s amusing enough to be worth watching while totally intoxicated one day, but it’s also not nearly good enough to recommend. It’s too limp to stand on its own, too all over the place to sit still for. I’d ask this movie to turn in its badge and gun, but I wouldn’t want to give it the satisfaction. Let’s just not.
William Bibbiani is the editor of CraveOnline’s Film Channel and the host of The B-Movies Podcast and The Blue Movies Podcast. Follow him on Twitter at @WilliamBibbiani.
