Cop Out

Directed by Kevin Smith

Runtime: 110 min.

BLACK ACADEMICS LIKE to hedge their career bets by justifying egregious pop culture stereotype as “tricksters.” Tracy Morgan is the first comedian to understand this game and plays it embarrassingly well in Cop Out, in which he portrays Paul Hodges, a juvenile, doofus black police detective and nine-year buddy/partner to Bruce Willis’ Jimmy Monroe.

This worthless action-comedy is credited to Kevin Smith, but such sloppiness wasn’t actually “directed” by anyone. Smith’s staging, composition, editing and humor mark him as utterly incompetent.That’s why Tracy Morgan’s coon show antics take over. His broad face and goofy baritone are the essence of how Hollywood once tried to stereotype Louis Armstrong; yet Morgan embraces the denigration, performing a string of mortifying buffooneries, peaking with “I set records with my shit-turds!” History should remember Morgan’s moving characterization in First Sunday as a ghetto rat who poignantly forsakes his own birthday. Hollywood rarely allows black comedians to show such depth. It’s proof that when Morgan told the Golden Globes audience, “I am the face of ‘postracial’ America,” his joke—like his cooning in Cop Out—was on them.