11:07:50 AM Will Edmondson: Tara, per our readers' mandate, we saw "Cop Out" last night, and I, for one, feel pretty okay about it.
11:08:19 AM Tara Ariano: I didn't have especially high expectations for it (quite the contrary, in fact), but I was pleasantly surprised!
11:09:02 AM Will Edmondson: You seemed to be dreading it!
11:09:19 AM Tara Ariano: It was getting pretty horrendous reviews (like Richard Roeper's, above), so I had cause.
11:10:22 AM Will Edmondson: Yeah, and we'll get to that later, because wow, some people do not like Kevin Smith! But let's quickly go over what this movie is about.

11:12:29 AM Tara Ariano: Basically: it's a buddy cop comedy. Where it differs from the formula is that the leads, Jimmy (Bruce Willis) and Paul (Tracy Morgan), have been partners for nine years, so after about the first half-hour, they don't really have any clashes over their style of police work. In fact, there's very little conflict between them at all.
11:16:03 AM Will Edmondson: Well, yeah, but you neglected to mention a very important thing: Most of this movie is spent trying to recove Bruce Willis's prized Andy Pafko 1952 Topps baseball card, which he's planning on selling for $83,000 to pay for his daughter's wedding.
11:16:53 AM Tara Ariano: Yes.
11:19:14 AM Will Edmondson: Quick web-based research tells us that $83,000 might be about right for a mint condition 1952 Pafko, "because so many people sorted their cards by number and wrapped rubber bands around their stacks." The more you know!

11:20:05 AM Tara Ariano: Fascinating!
11:22:40 AM Will Edmondson: Anyway, the point being the heads behind "Cop Out" certainly did their Google-based research. And they made at least one very smart casting decision: Stifler as a hyperactive convict.
11:23:34 AM Tara Ariano: In this case, "hyperactive" is shorthand for "coked out of his mind," and yes, he was hilarious. The bit in the trailer with him trying to get Paul to participate in a knock knock joke is even funnier in the movie (and I am not being sarcastic).
11:24:29 AM Will Edmondson: Yeah, he was great, sincerely. I always love me some Stifler. Or, by his Christian name, Seann William Scott.
11:25:24 AM Tara Ariano: Also good in a small role was Adam Brody. I like Justin Long, but some of his roles need to start going to Adam Brody instead. He's funny!
11:27:24 AM Will Edmondson: Yeah, he was fantastic. So, we've outlined some of the best parts of the movie, but I want to be clear: This movie is not great, but it's not horrible either. Maybe now would be a good time to start talking about some bad parts of the movie.

11:29:04 AM Tara Ariano: Well, first, if you want the audience to feel any suspense over whether Paul's wife Debbie is cheating on him, you don't cast Rashida Jones! She's too sweet and pure. We're used to seeing her play a nurse every week, for heaven's sake. A NURSE!
11:30:00 AM Will Edmondson: It also is the inherent "TV wife" problem, where the female lead is so much more attractive than the male lead that it's unbelievable.
11:30:59 AM Tara Ariano: Here's another thing: if the main impulse driving Bruce Willis's Jimmy is his daughter's wedding, maybe we could have seen her fiancé's face one time to see if he was worth it. We don't even see that dude when he's at the altar.
11:32:15 AM Will Edmondson: Good point, and that leads me to my BIGGEST PROBLEM WITH THE MOVIE! Jason Lee as the smarmy stepfather needed SOME KIND OF FACIAL HAIR! Come on! No beard? No 'stache?
11:32:35 AM Tara Ariano: To make up for the lack on his face, he had ALL the chest hair.
11:33:09 AM Will Edmondson: He's more than a piece of meat, Tara. He's a person. But you know, if this recap seems subdued, it's because it is; I was really expecting to have an extreme reaction to this movie and I didn't.

11:34:51 AM Tara Ariano: Yeah, same here. I wouldn't tell anyone they should go out of their way to see it on the big screen, but if it comes on cable in a few months and you're dozing on the couch on a Sunday afternoon, it would probably entertain you enough -- even with the swears cut out.
11:36:45 AM Will Edmondson: This movie is something that I should have loved. I love buddy cop movies, I love Tracy Morgan, I tolerate Bruce Willis, I love Rashida Jones, I love Stifler, I love baseball, baseball cards, and memorabilia. I like shoot 'em up gunfights, I like Adam Brody, and I like sophomoric humor.
11:36:59 AM Tara Ariano: You hate Kevin Smith?
11:38:17 AM Will Edmondson: Not at all, I have no bad feelings about him. I liked "Clerks," obviously. I liked "Dogma," "Mall Rats," and I don't mind the "Jay & Silent Bob" stuff. But, He's certainly had a rough go of it in the media recently.
11:38:54 AM Tara Ariano: Sometimes we bring heartache on ourselves.
11:41:08 AM Will Edmondson: Well, he's outspoken, for sure, and he's certainly partially to blame for his image problems. That Southwest Airlines beef got blown out of proportion pretty quickly. But I also don't think this movie's 20% Rotten Tomatoes rating is fair.

11:43:05 AM Tara Ariano: Yeah, those kinds of numbers put it in "All About Steve" territory, and it was definitely not that bad.
11:46:46 AM Will Edmondson: Oh, hardly! And it just makes me think that the reception for this movie has been clouded by Smith's extracurriculars, which is too bad. Because his response to the movie's Entertainment Weekly review was a bit much, but coming from a critic who'd given "Twilight" a B, he has a good point. This movie was not worse than "Twilight." "Twilight was one of the worst movies I've ever seen.
11:48:07 AM Tara Ariano: "Twilight," in Owen Gleiberman's view, more successfully achieved its ends than "Cop Out" did. He's not putting all movies on the same continuum and comparing them to each other. PLEASE let's not have this argument again.
11:53:18 AM Will Edmondson: Don't worry, we're not going to talk about your beloved "2012." And that's not to say that Gleiberman's review wasn't fair, it was very fair for this movie. But I think any time you say that a movie that is objectively horrible, like "Twilight" -- which, again was so bad that we recorded an hour-long profanity-laced podcast about it and raked it over the coals in this forum voraciously -- is more successful than this largely non-offensive, funny at times movie, it questions what the critic's motivations are in grading it.

11:53:38 AM Will Edmondson: Granted, if I had to grade this movie, I'd give it a solid C. Because it's completely middle-of-the-road.
11:55:37 AM Tara Ariano: Leaving aside the "Twilight" part: if you're an artist, you can't pick fights with critics over their bad reviews. Whether or not Smith was right that Gleiberman was working out some personal animus he had toward Smith...well, now Gleiberman has no shortage of ammunition the next time Smith ever directs a movie (or God forbid writes one). Dumb, dumb, dumb, shortsighted, dumb move.
12:01:31 PM Will Edmondson: I just think if you have a system where critics' verdicts are expected to in essence check an "artist's" creation (though "artist" might be a little bit misleading in this case, unless "dick jokes" is a medium), they should be held accountable for their criticism as well.  And, yes, Smith's response was ill-advised and shortsighted. But the point of all this is that this movie is not nearly as bad as it's been portrayed. And how much Smith's antics played into that is hard to say, but I bet it's a lot, and that's too bad.
12:01:54 PM Tara Ariano: Proving my point.

12:02:55 PM Will Edmondson: My point is that critics should be held accountable for their criticisms; your point is that their criticisms are criticisms and you can't question them lest you seem petty.
12:05:20 PM Tara Ariano: My point is that criticism is subjective by its nature, and if you don't agree with a judgment a critic makes, it's your privilege to write that critic off. (It's why I don't read David Denby anymore.)
12:09:41 PM Will Edmondson: Right, but I think simply by being EW's movie critic, you've got a lot of influence. And yes, to paraphrase Jay-Z (link NSFW), if you don't like someone's reviews you can "press fast-forward," so to speak. But I think that objective reviews are important, and all I'm saying is that they're not -- and again, Gleiberman could just be a huge RPattz fan -- that's something for which they should be responsible. That is what I think Smith meant, though he went about it in a very schoolyard, knee-jerk way.
12:10:04 PM Tara Ariano: But there's no such thing as objective reviews.
12:12:10 PM Will Edmondson: Of course not, I mean objective in the sense that reviews of movies should be about the movies. And not influenced by Edward the Vampire's dreamy gaze, or Kevin Smith's Twitter exploits.
12:15:13 PM Tara Ariano: We can't know what was in Gleiberman's mind when he reviewed "Cop Out," and neither can Smith. And I ended this argument last night by getting in a cab; I'll do it again.
12:15:38 PM Will Edmondson: HAH. Well, I await your retorts in the comments!