New York City has a pair of true hero cops working for it. These do-whatever-it-takes cops are Danson (Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson) and Highsmith (Samuel L. Jackson), and they are the medal winners of the force, the ones who will bring down any criminal, no matter the cost. What they won't do, though, is paperwork.
When Danson and Highsmith meet an untimely and utterly confusing end, the other detectives at their precinct feel the need to fill the hole left by them. One pair is Detectives Martin (Rob Riggle) and Fosse (Damon Wayans Jr.), another pair ...the other guys... are our heroes. Ferrell plays Allen Gamble, a forensic accountant who believes his place is behind the desk, while Mark Wahlberg plays Terry Hoitz, a cop with some serious anger management issues who is hated by most of the city for shooting one of the New York Yankees before the last game of the World Series.
When Gamble finally convinces Hoitz to look into a case the accountant believes to be "The big one," a series of construction jobs without any scaffolding permits, the pair ends up stumbling upon a doozy of a case that involves some major financial underhanded dealings.
The target of their investigation is David Ershon (Steve Coogan, Tropic Thunder), a big-time investor who has his thumb in a lot of pies. What Gamble and Hoitz don't realize is that Ershon is in a lot of trouble with one of his investors, and has to make up 32 billion dollars of lost money before the end of the quarter, else some hired goons, led by former black-ops agent Roger Wesley (Ray Stevenson, Punisher: War Zone, Rome), will have their way with Ershon.
One of the most amazing things about this film is the massive number of big names. Not only do you have one-off characters showing up like Yankee Derek Jeter (as himself) and Natalie Zea (Dirty Sexy Money), playing one of Gamble's old girlfriends, but bigger characters like the Captain (Michael Keaton) and Gamble's wife, Eva Mendes, are featured prominently in The Other Guys. In fact, there is a whole special feature dealing with the casting of the film and the fact that they were able to get such a great collection of people together for the film.
A lot of the rest of the special features deal with the ad-libbed and improv nature of many of the actors in the film. Besides the usual collection of gag reels and deleted scenes, there is also the Line-O-Rama that shows various actors trying out different lines while on the set and there is also one on Keaton's character working at his other job, at Bed Bath & Beyond. The sheer amount of footage cut from this filming session is amazing and proves Keaten hasn't lost his touch. Actually, I have to say that every time Keaton is in front of the camera, he pretty much steals the scene.
There is also a special feature concerning the stunts and action sequences for the film, of which there are a lot, and another involving brief interviews with the cast and crew, but in "extreme closeup" fashion where the camera guy gets right in the face of the interviewed. There is also a music video for Mendes' "Pimps Don't Cry," and an unusual commentary featuring the mothers of McKay, Ferrell and screenwriter Chris Henchy. There are also four or five random special features that involve everything from discussions with Riggle about his parties to interviews with Coogan and McKay about the differences between American and British life. There are a lot of special features here, though some are better than others.
The Other Guys is a peculiar movie that is far "smarter" than most Will Ferrell films and doesn't come off as just a series of comedic gags with an amusing, but shallow story stringing them together. Instead, this film actually throws in some social commentary about the nature of big business and what happens when a company is "too big to fail." While an odd selection, it is definitely worth watching, at least once. Both the comedy and the action is top notch, and the surprisingly comedic side of Wahlberg's acting comes through loud and clear and really helps to sell the whole movie. While worth watching, I wouldn't say its worth buying, and I'm not convinced that the visual and audio quality gained by the Blu-ray experience is enough to warrant choosing this version over the standard DVD one.
