Jeremy’s Tophunder №21: The Other Guys

6 min readApr 16, 2020

I’m not sure how it happened, but The Other Guys is the highest-ranked comedy on my list. It’s not the funniest movie I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen it enough times that most of the movie isn’t laugh-out-loud funny anymore. But it still holds the top spot for a weird, vaguely hipster-ish reason — it’s the funniest movie that not enough people talk about when the conversation of “Best Comedy” comes up. It should be in the conversation, but for a variety of unsatisfying reasons, it isn’t.

Released in 2010, I think a lot of people just had Will Ferrell fatigue. After a killer stretch from 2001–2006 (Zoolander, Old School, Elf, Anchorman, Wedding Crashers, Kicking & Screaming, Talladega Nights), Ferrell kind of fell off with a run of movies that were either disappointments, box office flops, or both (Semi-Pro, Blades of Glory, Land of The Lost). I can see how in 2010 people wouldn’t be super excited to go catch Will Ferrell’s latest effort. Throw in Mark Wahlberg (an often-mediocre and highly polarizing actor) trying out comedy for really the first time, I think a lot of people just skipped it. It didn’t bomb at the box office, grossing $170 million against a $100 million budget, but movies with budgets that high are usually expected to earn at least twice their budget.

For me, The Other Guys remains a hidden gem towards the end of the great run of comedies we had in the early 2000s. It doesn’t get the same recognition as Ferrell’s other hits, or the Judd Apatow-produced comedies, but it’s every bit as funny, just as chalk-full of random, throw-away hilarious lines.

Mark Wahlberg spends two hours over-acting to an absolutely staggering level, and that alone was worth the price of admission. In every scene, he’s either shouting, or trying his hardest to look like an amateur actor doing a Mark Wahlberg impression. It’s truly magnificent. Perhaps his best scene is one that didn’t even make the theatrical cut of the movie, it’s a deleted scene where he tries to win back his ex-girlfriend at an art gallery, and it’s amazing. Here he is not understanding what the Federal Reserve is.

I have a strange affinity for Mark Wahlberg. Like, he’s not that great of an actor. He’s been nominated for two Oscars (The Departed and The Fighter), but after seeing his career for the last 20+ years, I’m not sure he was acting in either one of them. He’s just naturally a tough, blue-collar dude from Boston, and any role where he plays a tough, blue-color dude from Boston is going to come off incredibly strong. I don’t think he was a substantially better actor in The Departed or The Fighter than he was in Patriots Day or any of the other four movies he collaborated with Pete Berg on— just The Departed and The Fighter were better movies with better directors who could point Wahlberg (and his character) in the right direction, and based on the success he’s had playing off other star actors, it stands to reason that he’s probably at his best in a supporting or co-starring role, rather than trying to carry a movie on his own. That’s partly why I always thought comedy was the right place for Wahlberg; comedies play to his strengths. He’ll have other funny people to riff off of, and his tendency to over-dramatize things won’t feel like over-acting, it will feel like a joke. The Other Guys, as mentioned above, was Wahlberg’s first foray into straight comedy, and I think he nails every scene.

Ferrell also nails his role, as the pencil-pushing accountant. Ferrell is obviously best known for playing ridiculous man-boys in movies like [gestures at Will Ferrell’s entire career], but my personal favorite Ferrell performances are when he plays a (mostly) normal dude who has a house and a wife and a steady job, like here, or in Old School. If you told me in 2010 that the year’s best comedy would be starring Will Ferrell and Mark Wahlberg, I would have assumed that Ferrell would be doing Ferrell things and Wahlberg would be the straight man. The Other Guys flips the script, and it pays off.

Michael Keaton is also amazing as Ferrell and Wahlberg’s captain with the NYPD. Here’s a four-minute supercut of some of his funniest scenes, including all four of his “unintentional” TLC lyrics. My favorite is when he gives himself an eyebrow raise after a great one-liner (around the 1:30 mark of the video, I won’t spoil the line if you don’t know it).

It’s an exceedingly quotable movie because so many of the funniest lines are random non-sequiturs or exchanges between characters that don’t really have anything to do with the plot. One of my best friends and I will occasionally just text each other out-of-context lines from the movie just to make each other giggle.

It has all of the elements of a Buddy Cop movie that you’d want. Ferrell and Wahlberg have great chemistry together, the high-energy and action sequences all provide great laughs as well as excitement, and it makes great use of its minor characters, particularly the cameos from Samuel L. Jackson and Dwayne Johnson, and their subsequent proteges in Damon Wayans Jr. and Rob Riggle. It’s rare that a famous actor being in a movie is a joke in and of itself, but that’s kind of the case here with Jackson and Johnson (and Eva Mendes, for that matter). Jackson and Johnson play exactly the cartoonish rough-and-tumble cops you’d expect them to, and Eva Mendes plays the (literally) unbelievably attractive wife of Ferrell’s very plain and bland character.

The Other Guys isn’t like Anchorman (where most of the characters are absurdly over-the-top) or Dodgeball or Zoolander (which has a ridiculous premise in addition to the characters going absurdly over-the-top), but it’s also not like Superbad (which has a common and relatable premise, and, for the most part, relatable characters). It’s in a weird sweet spot where the premise is believable enough, because it’s a cliche (cops working a big case even after they’ve been told not to), and characters that are (vaguely) believable enough, again, because they’re cliche, just turned up slightly past the point where they make sense. The characters act pretty much how you’d expect them to, just exaggerated.

The Other Guys could very easily be remade into a serious movie. One subdued, by the book cop that barely leaves the office is teamed up with a play-by-his-own rules renegade, and they tackle what seems like small case but snowballs into a massive conspiracy, all while they operate under the shadow of two higher-profile cops and everyone else tries to shut down their investigation. There are 100 movies with basically that premise. Now just take every character in that movie and make them 15 percent more cliche, and make sure everyone is in on the joke, and you have a decent comedy. Turn everything up another 15 percent and you have The Other Guys. It’s an incredibly formulaic movie, and a decent amount of the humor comes from the fact that they take actively and intentionally play into that formula.

I’ve seen The Other Guys more times than I can count, but somehow I still find enough funny moments to satisfy me, usually random jokes that I forgot about since my last viewing. It’s either the most or second-most rewatchable comedy I can think of, behind only the №33 entry on this list, which we’ll get to in May. Until then, we’re left with The Other Guys, sliding in at №21.

(For a refresher on the project, I introduced it in a Facebook Post on Day 1)

Here’s our progress on the list so far:

6. The Fugitive

7. The Dark Knight

9. Saving Private Ryan

11. The Big Short

13. Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring

17. Ocean’s 11

18. Air Force One

21. The Other Guys

22. Remember The Titans

24. Apollo 13