Death at a Funeral - *1/2

I don't know why the original Death at a Funeral needed an update a few years after it was made, but apparently it did, and we have it now, from acclaimed writer/director Neil LaBute. I also don't know why acclaimed writer/director Neil LaBute needed to venture into the low-brow comedy territory, but here we are. The new Death at a Funeral features a host of aimlessly crude jokes split equally between four different subplots with different areas of a family coming together for a funeral. A good portion of these jokes, mainly the ones about poop, or at the expense of a homosexual midget blackmailing the family with racy photos of their deceased father, or delivered by Martin Lawrence, fail completely. Others actually are pretty funny at times, though I'm doubtful it has anything to do with the awful writing, and everything to do with the actors performing them, Tracy Morgan and the underrated James Marsden in particular. The rest of the comedy stems from reactions of people hearing comments through paper-thin walls and zany sitcom moments, like when the guys think they've accidentally killed the midget while their wheel-chair bound uncle takes a shit in the next room. I think I'd rather have been shitting in the next room while this was going on as well, because I'm pretty sure that's what Mr. LaBute was doing instead of directing it.

Cop Out - **1/2

The first scene of Kevin Smith's Cop Out is fantastic. It's cliche, sure, but it's done so very well and involves a frantic Tracy Morgan yelling and screaming bits of dialogue from every shoot-em-up action movie of the last two or so decades, while a somber Bruce Willis looks on and notes the films these lines came from. There's even a somewhat "meta" moment when Morgan hollers a line from Willis' Die Hard, to which Willis claims he "hasn't seen that one". Like I said, it's nowhere near original, but it's cute and it works and really, how could it fail? You've got action star Willis, funnyman Morgan, and director Smith who is known as a pop culture junkie who often pays homage to these sorts of films in his own work.

How could it fail? Just see the rest of the movie. Oh, sure, it's funny, from time to time, but that isn't enough to support a whole movie. The plot is filled with the moments that made Lethal Weapon and Running Scared exciting and hilarious, while in this movie they just seem retread and tired. It doesn't help, either, that the score was done by Harold Faltermeyer, of Beverly Hills Cop fame, who does an excellent job in recreating that 1980's buddy cop sound in his themes, but to no avail in a film that is so glaringly from this century. I think that might be the film's biggest flaw - that it suffers from a strange identity crisis in wanting to be something fun and a bit retro for a target audience who just doesn't want to see this type of movie and is thus seen by young people who probably don't get (or care about) most of the references being made, and so it's stars and soundtrack just make it feel "old".