Yippie-ki-yay, mother phoner!

Sometimes the release of movies are impeccably timed with just the right holiday. You have your Christmas films released on Thanksgiving weekend, your horror films released for Halloween, and then you have your Kevin Smith film that hits Blu-ray just in time for Comic-Con. It doesn't get more perfect that that.

Cop Out (aka A Couple of Dicks) stars Bruce Willis (Moonlighting, Die Hard, Surrogates) and Tracy Morgan (Saturday Night Live, Jay and Silent Bob Strake Back) as a couple of detectives working in Brooklyn.  Cop Out is a buddy cop comedy simultaneously making fun of and paying homage to buddy cop movies.

The plot is original, but is made to feel classic. Detectives Jimmy Monroe (Willis) and Paul Hodges (Morgan) botch a drug bust and get suspended, causing Jimmy to have to sell his prized possession: The first Topps baseball card ever minted in order to be able to afford to pay for his daughter's (Michelle Trachtenburg – Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Eurotrip) wedding so that her smarmy step-father (Jason Lee – The Jersey Chronicles, My Name is Earl) doesn't step in and take all the credit. Naturally, things go wrong and the comedic duo end up employing methods and people that aren't exactly by the book.

While changing the name from A Couple of Dicks to Cop Out was indeed a cop out, the comedy itself was everything you might expect from Kevin Smith directing David Addison from Moonlighting as an action cop: damn funny, and yet somehow convincing. The dialogue was so close to something Kevin Smith would have written himself, it seemed like any second Jay and Silent Bob were going to make their cameo.

As he proved in Surrogates, Bruce Willis can take an absurd situation like transitioning from David Addison to John McClane and make it feel like everything is completely normal.

Tracy Morgan is every bit as funny as he's always been in Saturday Night Live, but his character was for me the last straw in bringing the movie past the point of believable and into absurdity, thus taking me out of the film. It's important to note that this is where I felt the film was flawed, I still felt it was undeniably enjoyable enough for any fan of Kevin Smith, Bruce Willis, or Tracy Morgan to own.

Extras

The ultimate reasons that even a casual Kevin Smith fan will need to add this to their collection are the extras. After your first time through the film, slam the movie into "Maximum Comedy Mode" which is not like any director commentary you've ever sen before. it's like watching an interactive Kevin Smith stage Q&A, but all about one subject: Cop Out. The addition of this format, suits perfectly both the film and Kevin Smith's style. multiple levels of movie metadata will send SModcast fans squeeing in their seats as it just keeps getting better. The movie you just watched in regular mode that was a fun little light action comedy? You'll never watch it again cause Maximum Comedy Mode is just too awesome. You have all the obligatory extended and deleted scenes, plus everything that makes a Kevin Smith commentary great. The only thing that could have possibly made this better would have been a second Maximum Comedy Mode from the live version at Comic-Con 2010, but this film came out the Tuesday before that.

The bottom line is if you love slapstick comedy, 80s buddy cop films, or are a SModcast listener, you're going to want to own Cop Out, and now it's available on Blu-ray in 1080p with uncompressed DTS-HD High Res Audio.

ComicsOnline gives Cop Out on Blu-ray 4 out of 5 mint collectibles.

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