Cop Out
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 wasnt actually directed by anyone. Smiths staging, composition, editing and humor mark him as utterly incompetent.Thats why Tracy Morgans 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 Morgans moving characterization in First Sunday as a ghetto rat who poignantly forsakes his own birthday. Hollywood rarely allows black comedians to show such depth. Its proof that when Morgan told the Golden Globes audience, I am the face of postracial America, his jokelike his cooning in Cop Outwas on them.