Jake Johnson and Damon Wayons Jr – a.k.a. two of the three guys who live with Zooey Deschanel in The New Girl – are two no-hopers in this giant credulity stretch of a film. Inexplicably (literally they make no effort to explain this) the duo obtain two real life police uniforms for what they believe is a costume party. They discover that in the alternative universe they exist in, police are treated with some mixture of hero worship, uninhibited sexual attraction and quaking fear by every member of the general public. Except of course for the mafia boss from Random-stan in Europe who they accidentally cross.
Filled with the rush of discovery and purpose, these two dimwits choose to ditch their real lives to permanently pretend to be cops, skipping through a series of increasingly improbable scenarios before ultimately taking on their Randomstanian foe.
Luke Greenfield has previously directed a bunch of films that we will politely group as comedies – Rob Schneider’s The Animal; the passable The Girl Next Door; and the woeful Something Borrowed– and he co-writes and directs this sitcom sub-plot on steroids.
Because that’s what this should be: A sequence of laughable interludes to a main plot in a half hour comedy. There are funny moments, but they are the sort that belong in the background to Zooey Deschanel providing some pathos, not front and centre supporting an entire film.
Let’s Be Cops is fun, and as such gets a pass as a comedy, but it is also distractingly improbable and not-seldom-enough casually offensive, causing you to think in the middle of a mindless comedy, which in itself should be a crime.
