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By Owen Glieberman

The reason somebody gets to be a big-screen comedy star would appear to be fairly basic: He makes a lot of people laugh. But comedy is a funny business. Even when it's silly and bent, a blast of pure popcorn goofiness, it doesn't have to be just silly; it can express something quirky and resonant about the comedian in question — and, by extension, about us. Will Ferrell took an unfair lashing last summer for Land of the Lost (the movie was bad, but not nearly the catastrophe it was made out to be, and Ferrell, doing a naughty kiddie picture in the tradition of Elf, had his moments). You can feel him react to the spanking he got from the media in the flair and ambition of The Other Guys, a nerd-out-of-water destructo action comedy starring Ferrell as a New York police bureaucrat named Allen Gamble who's a ridiculously mild and persnickety fussbudget — an eager nobody who works as a paper pusher and, more than that, likes it. The movie is as antic and raucous and fun as any of the star's previous screen outings, only this one has a surprisingly personal flavor. It's Ferrell's richest riff yet on the comedy of conflicted aggression.

Allen has never fired a gun, and doesn't want to; he has never walked a traffic beat. He's the furthest thing from P.K. Highsmith (Samuel L. Jackson) and Christopher Danson (Dwayne Johnson), the two rapaciously dirty-minded bad-boy supercops who open the film with a nifty satiric let's-trash-the-city chase sequence. Instead, Allen is one of the ''other guys,'' the unheroic desk-jockey schlubs who stand around in the background clad in ugly plaid jackets. Within the locker-room atmosphere of the precinct house, he's not a law enforcer. He's not really a cop at all.

The movie is about how this officious wimp, with his pudgy-cheeked complacency and aviator-framed glasses, gets shoved onto the streets and into the world of real guns and real crime. Mark Wahlberg plays his testy, conventional, roughneck partner, Terry Hoitz, who got sidelined and drew this short straw of a detective buddy because he had the misfortune of shooting New York Yankee Derek Jeter while on duty. The Other Guys is almost a recognizably gritty genre picture, complete with bullet spray, Sidney Lumet gunmetal lighting, and a Wall Street villain (Steve Coogan) who embodies the sins of our time with a relative absence of cheek. All of that grounds the movie and makes it funnier.

Not that Ferrell has left his surrealist-prankster side at home. The Other Guys gets you chuckling at the little details of Allen's stick-up-the-butt patheticness, like the way he hums while typing, or argues with Terry about how a school of tuna could whip a lion, or blasts Little River Band CDs in his sad, dinky red Prius. (Terry: ''I feel like we're literally driving around in a vagina.'') A few of the jokes are sly, many are quite obvious, but what knits the laughs together is the nearly confessional conviction with which Ferrell delivers them. He's not playing just another geek idiot — as, say, Rob Schneider does. He digs into some elemental side of himself, a side that craves order and niceness and civility, that shrinks from danger and violence. Allen is such a straight arrow that he might have stepped out of the 1950s; he doesn't even realize that his wife (Eva Mendes) is a total hottie. But that's also a tip-off that he's got a secret, suppressed raunchy side, a big-pimpin' alter ego named Gator who starts to ooze out, to uproarious effect, as the movie goes on.

Teaming up once again with director Adam McKay (Anchorman, Talladega Nights), Ferrell makes Allen another of his classic divided personalities, only now he draws back from caricature — at least, more than when he played a blowhard egomaniac like Ron Burgundy. In The Other Guys, Ferrell cuts down on the stylized hysteria, and he doesn't run around with his belly hanging out. As an actor, he's closer here to Peter Sellers or the early Woody Allen; he does obsessive riffs on being an insanely cautious man in a culture that prizes control. Allen is a schmo who winds up in the middle of his own action thriller. When a bomb blows out a storefront, he doesn't dive ahead of it, hero-style — he gets blasted and lies on the ground, shouting, ''I need an MRI! There's no way I don't have soft-tissue damage right now!'' The Other Guys is aimed at all of us out there who long for excitement yet cling to safety because we're more desk jockey than supercop ourselves. It's a comedy of manhood for the age of emasculation. A-

Copyright 2010 Entertainment Weekly

Arrestingly Funny

By Michael Rechtshaffen

Just when it seemed like the once-robust buddy-cop action-comedy was going to require a do-not-resuscitate order, along comes Will Ferrell and Adam McKay to show 'em how it's done.

Having successfully collaborated with director-writer McKay several times in the past, most notably on "Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy" and "Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby," Ferrell keeps the winning streak intact while drawing out Mark Wahlberg's untapped funny side in "The Other Guys."

Although their yin-yang dynamic makes for the comic dream team of the summer, they receive plenty of expert backup from Michael Keaton, Eva Mendes, Steve Coogan, Samuel L. Jackson and Dwayne Johnson.

The ridiculously entertaining results should result in a sizable haul for the Columbia release, which occupies the same early August slot as 2008's sleeper hit "The Pineapple Express."

Not quite New York's finest, Ferrell and Wahlberg are constantly overlooked Detectives Allen Gamble and Terry Hoitz, respectively.

While nerdy Gamble is perfectly content with his forensic-accounting job, intense Hoitz is itching to see real action instead of being left to clean up after stationhouse hotshots P.K. Highsmith (Jackson) and Christopher Danson (Johnson).

Hoitz finally gets his wish when one of Gamble's paper trails leads them to a big-time crime of Bernie Madoff proportions, much to the continuing headache of precinct chief, Capt. Mauch (a pitch-perfect Keaton), who supplements his tight income by moonlighting as a manager at a Bed, Bath & Beyond.

Nimbly blending comedy and action -- with an affectionate slo-mo nod to John Woo -- McKay does his best work to date here, and though the picture could have benefited from a tighter edit, there's no shortage of inspired sequences.

Working from a flexible script he penned with Chris Henchy and evident input from Ferrell, McKay also puts Wahlberg's trademark intensity to effective use here, especially during a destined-to-be-a-classic sequence in which Ferrell brings him home to meet his "plain" ball and chain, who, much to Wahlberg's all-consuming incredulity, turns out to be smoking-hot Mendes.

Mendes -- who also can be heard cooing the catchy closing theme song, "Pimps Don't Cry," with Gnarls Barkley's Cee-Lo -- is gamely appealing, as are all the other guys in "The Other Guys."

Speaking of the closing, thanks to the implementation of eye-catching graphics and sobering factoids, the film's end credits crawl is anything but routine, providing unexpectedly enlightening financial food for thought.

Copyright 2010 Hollywood Reporter

Wildly Hilarious

By Peter Travers

Take a plot about two NYPD detectives who sit on the sidelines while other cops get all the shootouts and glam headlines. Kick it up a notch by casting Will Ferrell and Mark Wahlberg as the losers who stumble into the big time. Spice with giddy action from the script by Chris Henchy and director Adam McKay. Then sit back and laugh your ass off. I did.

Ferrell and McKay scored with Anchorman, Talladega Nights and Step Brothers, and, with Henchy, they started the influential comedy website Funny or Die. That's Hall of Fame funny, right there. In The Other Guys, they're flying on comic helium. OK, the balloon loses altitude from time to time, but Ferrell and Wahlberg are a comic riot.

Ferrell is effortlessly uproarious. And watching hardass Wahlberg, in his first starring shot at farce, shake his sillies out is not to be missed. Catch his double and triple takes when the wife Ferrell claims to be embarrassed by turns out to be crazy-sexy Eva Mendes. But there I go giving away the jokes. Don't let anyone spoil the wildly hilarious surprises. Ferrell and Wahlberg will double your fun. Guaranteed.

Copyright 2010 Rolling Stone