Movie Review: Let’s Be Cops

Somehow I didn’t realise the main actor in this movie was Damon Wayans’ son.  In retrospect, that was amazingly dense of me.  He looks a lot like his father and was slightly funnier, or perhaps the story had a little more to it.  The premise of the movie isn’t all that plausible, but you expect that at most comedies, or at least I do.  Justin (Wayans) and his roommate Ryan, played by Jake Johnson, played well off of each other throughout the story.  The two are in their thirties and have amounted to next to nothing, having moved from Ohio to LA in hopes of making something of themselves.  Ryan mistakes an invitation to a masquerade as a costume party and the two show up in cop uniforms, the same ones Justin had used to pitch his game idea.  After they leave the party, they discover that people really do mistake them for cops and they get up to all kinds of trouble.  Ryan doesn’t have a daytime job and begins to train himself to be a cop, getting embroiled into a huge operation of smuggled goods.

The story is far from perfect.  There are all sorts of really silly things that happen that you have to suspend great amounts of disbelief for, and at the same time, I really enjoyed it.  There was a point where Justin is being called a wimp (I’m making that G for the audience), and he decides to go into work and really go for it instead of being meek and scared, and it works.  While the moral of the movie is absurd, it had some staying power and with enough laughs and some slight drama, it was worth the $7 for sure.