The NYPD is made of numerous kinds of police officers, but the best kind are the ones that are always making the big busts and making the biggest explosions which is P.K. Highsmith (Samuel L. Jackson) and Christopher Danson (Dwayne Johnson).  After a mysterious accident during a day on the job P.K. and Christopher are dead.  This has left the door open for a new set of badass cops, and this is where those other guys come in.  Allen Gamble (Will Ferrell) and Terry Hoitz (Mark Wahlberg) are the two cops that are always screwing up and now that Highsmith and Danson are gone they find that this is their chance to show good.

The film is basically another ridiculous comedy with Will Ferrell playing an out of touch character who’s happy behind the desk and has a dark side hidden within.  Adam McKay comes with another brilliant hit, after having previously done Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby, Step Brothers and Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, and he doesn’t seem to have any signs of slowing down.  What I love, just like in all of McKay’s previous films, is that we never at any point get a chance to stop and wonder how unreal the movie is.  We’re just barraged with so much ridiculousness and all of these actors who know how to play it straight.  It just makes it so funny to see something like watching Eva Mendes, who plays Dr. Sheila Gamble (Allen’s wife), telling Ferrell to come home safe and that her boobs are for him when he comes home and watching everyone in the movie deliver all of these lines with such a straight face is just special.

What makes this movie special is the fact that all the jokes hit perfectly.  These two really bad cops work together to put one of the biggest criminals today behind bars.  The crime being perpetrated in this film is so huge that the criminal seems legitimate.  It’s the head of a Ponzi scheme that no one knows is a Ponzi scheme.  For all of you out there who have no idea what a Ponzi scheme is I recommend that you read about it on Wikipedia (or just pay attention during the credits of this movie).  What makes this investigation work for this film is that for the first near ninety minutes of the movie we’re not sure whether David Ershon (Steve Coogan) is actually doing this.  We know he’s bad and a criminal, but we’re not sure what kind of a corporate crime we’re really dealing with here, and then when we eventually find out that what Ershon is doing is this crime which is built on suckering people into making bad decisions I couldn’t help but think of that as a little joke itself with the rest of the film.

One complaint that I do have for this film is exactly the same worry I had when I saw the trailer for the first time.  I was afraid that when we finally hit the ending of the film and we had to switch from just a bunch of ridiculous characters being stupid to a ton of action scenes that the film would finally show that it isn’t that great a movie, and it did.  The action in the last fifteen minutes of this movie is pretty unrewarding, which is really odd since the over the top sequences at the beginning of the film with Sam Jackson and Dwayne Johnson is so enjoyable because it is just so awesomely stupid.  It just forces you to ask why the action with Ferrell and Wahlberg couldn’t be just like that, because the whole idea of the film is that Ferrell and Wahlberg are going to be the new awesome cops and by the end of the film they basically are, so why aren’t the kicking ass like the awesome cops that they are?  However, since this really is only a minor problem for me it doesn’t ruin the film for me at all.

Overall this is one of the funniest movies of the year so far and I can’t wait to see it again.  Everyone needs to go see this now.

IMDB says 7.0/10

Rotten Tomatoes says 78%

I say 8.5/10