Any attempts to revive the buddy-cop genre have been firmly put back this weekend by Kevin Smith’s “Cop Out,” which, by all accounts, takes a pretty dreadful script and makes it even worse, even with the appealing-on-paper combo of Bruce Willis and Tracy Morgan. For the moment, however, it’s not stopping others from taking another stab of the genre.
Pajiba, second only to Nikki Finke at scoop-breaking at the moment (and much, much better human beings…) are reporting that Ashton Kutcher and Jamie Foxx, who can both be currently be seen on screens in “Valentine’s Day,” are teaming up for the action-comedy “Streets on Fire.” The script, by journalist Justin Britt-Gibson, made last year’s Black List, and follows two rookie Chicago cops, one hot-headed and black, the other white and lazy, a former quarterback whose attempt to turn pro was stopped by a sex scandal. Together they stumble across a group of killers stealing drugs from the city’s criminal gangs, who (SPOILER) turn out to be crooked cops.
Sound like every buddy cop movie ever made? You’d be right. We read the script last night, and, while more competent and less annoying than the “A Couple of Dicks” script that became “Cop-Out,” it’s an unbelievably generic cop movie, (with a plot lifted liberally from “The Dark Knight,” of all things), a time capsule to the mid ’80s, but not even the good, “Lethal Weapon” kind, but the kind that starred Billy Crystal and Gregory Hines.
The last few years have proven that, if you’re going to tackle the action-comedy genre, you need to bring something new to the table, and the most successful examples, like “Hot Fuzz” and “Pineapple Express” have done exactly that. “Streets On Fire” has literally nothing we haven’t seen before, and the two attached actors don’t hold much promise — Foxx is a decent actor, but sometimes seems more interested in his vanity hip-hop career than making decent movies, while Kutcher has never, ever, ever made a film worth anything close to a damn. No director’s attached yet, so fingers crossed this one languishes in development hell.
