Ah yes, Cop Out.  The movie with the fantastic nomenclatural history–which is basically just a fancy way of saying the name’s been through a lot of changes.  Well, the folks out at Warner Brothers sent me a copy of Cop Out to review, and it’s about what you’d expect from a Kevin Smith cop drama: dick jokes, foul language, lots and lots of dialogue, and plenty of laughs of both the uncomfortable and genuine variety.

Cop Out follows a pair of New York police detectives (the original titular pair of dicks in question, the unlikely but effective combination of Bruce Willis and Tracy Morgan) in the midst of a Mexican gang affair…but they’re chasing a missing baseball card, mostly because their latest misadventure got them all sorts of suspended.  But when their search for the missing baseball card–fueled by one of the cops’ daughter getting married and wanting a magnificent dream wedding.  But when they go hunting for the card, they find themselves neck deep in a Mexican gang drug war.

Cop Out, as some of you may well know, started life as A Couple of Dicks.  But when it was discovered that no one could actually advertise the show except at night, the name was promptly changed.  First, to A Couple of Cops, and then to Cop Out, which is basically what the new titles were.

And Cop Out has its share of funny moments.  It also has its share of ridiculously overblown dialogue and its share of absolutely juvenile humor and its share of jokes that fall flat.  Cop Out may suggest we rock out with our Glocks out, but the schlock, meanwhile, is fully in place.

But this is par for the course for a Kevin Smith movie.  I was kind of amazed, in all honesty, that Jay and Silent Bob made no appearance that I could tell here.  Because everything else I expect out of a Kevin Smith movie is right here.

It’s easy to trash Smith’s work as juvenile and puerile–there’s plenty of evidence to support such a claim–but it’s just as easy to make and support the claim that it’s funny.  How do I know?  Because I laughed.  And that’s the surest proof that a comedy works.

The Screenhead Ten Scale, therefore, gives Cop Out a six out of ten because it’s funny, at least every so often, but it also traces over a lot of ground that Smith seems to refuse to want to leave.  It’s every inch a Kevin Smith movie, and this is actually both good news and bad news all in one patch.