Ed's Review Dot Com

Cube Vision, Universal Pictures, Will Packer Productions,

Ice Cube, Kevin Hart, Olivia Munn, Ken Jeong, Benjamin Bratt, Tika Sumpter, Sherri Shepherd

Ben Barber (Kevin Hart) is about to get married to detective James Payton (Ice Cube)’s sister making them future Brother’s-in-law. But after Ben’s success in the last film, he is chomping at the bit to become a full fledged detective like his brother in law. But he’s just out of the police academy and not ready yet. When James has to take a road trip down to Miami to interview the technical nerd who has broken into the phone of a drug lord, he decides somewhat reluctantly to take Ben along simply to prove to him that he’s not detective material. Naturally things go awry, and the pair end up in a dangerous cat and mouse game with some real bad dudes.

With this sequel that starts immediately after the first film, you get exactly what you would expect. This is no pearl, but it is what it is. Kevin Hart is a pretty funny guy, and he knows how to make you laugh when he’s not annoying the crap out of you. Ice Cube is a really good, dry and serious, all business straight man, and then the story is just a vehicle to allow these guys to do what they do, and they do it very well. Trouble is we’ve seen this already, and it’s very similar to every other buddy cop movie where one is a bumbling but good-hearted Jerry Lewis guy who fouls everything up, and the other is a sometimes borderline mean, but always serious Dean Martin straight man. Like Abbott and Costello of the old days took half hour vaudeville routines and turned them into feature films, this vaudeville “standup act” is made into a movie as well. That’s not to say that it’s not a good story or even a good movie. But what you expect is what you get, and I can see how this would irritate the heck out of a lot of people. So I’m not giving it a glowing rush out and rent it rating, but I am saying if you find Cube and Hart a funny standup act, you’re bound to enjoy this film. So use wisdom in deciding whether to invest the hour and a half or not on this film, but if you like slap stick funny movies, by all means go for it.

EdG – EdsReview Dot Com – A Movie Review Blog

Lakeshore Entertainment, Sidney Kimmel Entertainment,

Katherine Heigl, Jason O’Mara, Daniel Sunjata, John Leguizamo, Sherri Shepherd, Debbie Reynolds, Debra Monk, Nate Mooney, Patrick Fischler, Ana Reeder

Stephanie Plum (Katherine Heigl) has lost her job and is broke, so she approaches her cousin and insists he giver her a job as a bounty hunter. Her cousin is a bail bondsmen, and one of his crack trackers is out sick, and so reluctantly he lets her chase a few escapees. But the big score is ex-cop Joe Morelli (Jason O’Mara) who jumped bail, but is her ex. The two hate each other, and the set off on a chase where she thinks he’s capturing him, and he thinks he’s proving his innocence while trying to keep her off his back. In fact, they need each other, and it turns into an intense chase with a lot of humor thrown in.

This is a rather standard cops and robbers, bounty hunter, romantic comedy type film. It follows a lot of the plots of other similar films. I was a bit surprised by it, as I expected it to be a funny rom-com and it was much more serious than I expected. The truth is that most of the film was police/ex-police chasing the bad guys down against all odds and as an outlaw. That too has been done a lot of times. Not a terrible film, but just mediocre. There’s nothing wrong with picking this up at the RedBox for a quiet evening, but don’t go into it expecting too much. I didn’t hate it, but it also did not have much going for it either. Outside of Katherine Heigl, the rest of the cast was so-so. I guess this comes from a series of books, and perhaps they took too many shortcuts just trying to following the book without being too original on their own, but there are definitely some problems. But as I said, it was relaxing watching it, and I had a decent time watching it.

EdG – EdsReview Dot Com – A Movie Review Blog