The Other Guys Review

McKay's method is to write scenes that keep going a beat past the joke, and it works because Ferrell and Wahlberg are playing genuinely different films. Ferrell is placid, pedantic and quietly deranged, a man delighted by paperwork with a past he refuses to discuss; Wahlberg plays furious incomprehension at full volume, and the gap between them carries the picture. The supporting bench is loaded. Michael Keaton's captain moonlighting at Bed Bath and Beyond and quoting TLC lyrics without knowing it is a better joke than the plot it is attached to, and the opening minutes with Johnson and Jackson are a complete short film about action-movie logic.

The actual case is the weak part, deliberately so, but a mystery you cannot follow is still a mystery you cannot follow, and the middle sags whenever the film remembers it has one. What lifts it above its shelf is the ending: a credits sequence of animated infographics about Ponzi schemes and executive pay, played straight, in a film that opened with a car chase through a bodega. Nobody asked for it, and it is the most memorable thing here.