

Let's Be Cops Review
From the director of the very good The Girl Next Door and the very, very awful The Animal comes a movie that falls directly in the middle—Let’s Be Cops, a rudimentary comedy that starts off strong but ends in a shootout where no one wins.
Let’s Be Cops stars Jake Johnson and Damon Wayans Jr. as two losers who dress up like cops for a costume party--and decide to just stick with it for the next several weeks, completely unaware that it’s a serious crime to pose as police officers. They proceed with reckless abandon—until they get caught up in a serious battle with a dangerous mob boss.
The movie rolls with lights flashing at first, propelled by its fun premise and the solid chemistry between Johnson and Wayans. Working off a script by director Luke Greenfield and co-writer Nicholas Thomas, Let’s Be Cops offers some innocent, silly laughs that will leave you chuckling.
But once the rubber hits the road, the movie hits the spike strips and spins out of control. After a decent first act, Let’s Be Cops stops being funny. For an R-rated comedy, it is shockingly tame, failing to take full advantage of the potential offered by its premise. For a movie about two single guys with newfound and unmatched power, Let’s Be Cops plays more like a PG-rated film with a few scandalous moments.
Things get even worse as Let’s Be Cops gets handcuffed by its action-comedy premise; the third act gets too serious and too focused on the action to be any good. There’s nothing worse than a comedy that suddenly tries to be an action movie; the action isn’t very good, and the humor is abandoned. Let’s Be Cops commits this unforgivable crime.
Let’s Be Cops is harmless in many ways and offers enough laughs early on to carry things for a while, but ultimately the movie fails to capitalize on its premise.
Review by Erik Samdahl unless otherwise indicated.