Coffee & Kareem, 2020.
Directed by Michael Dowse.
Starring Ed Helms, Terrence Little Gardenhigh, Betty Gilpin, RonReaco Lee, Andrew Bachelor, David Alan Grier, and Taraji P. Henson.
SYNOPSIS:
A 12-year-old’s scheme to scare away his mom’s new boyfriend, police officer James Coffee, backfires, exposing his family to a secret network of criminal activity.
The low-effort punnery of this buddy cop movie’s title more-or-less underlines what audiences should expect from it, and while in our trying present times there’s worse things for a comedy to be than blandly “whatever,” Coffee & Kareem‘s obvious potential ultimately makes it a thoroughly missed opportunity.
Straining credibility even for the standards of its sub-genre, Michael Dowse’s (Stuber) film teams up bumbling cop James Coffee (Ed Helms) with Kareem (Terrence Little Gardenhigh), the loudmouth 12-year-old son of his romantic partner Vanessa (Taraji P. Henson) for 88 minutes of gay panic, jarring tonal switch-footing, and middling action sequences.
Naturally, Kareem isn’t much keen that his mother is dating a man who happens to be both white and a cop, and ends up hiring some local criminals to try and scare him away. This backfires spectacularly, however, when the pair ends up on the lam together with a fleet of criminals and the cops both chasing them down.
Though Shane Mack’s script provides intermittent laughs – largely by way of its randomly-deployed pop-culture references running the gamut from Nancy Myers movies to the Nicolas Cage-Werner Herzog joint Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans – it too often settles for lazy, vulgar humour and half-hearted, SNL-style skit parodies of action-comedy tropes.
Yet as Friedberg and Seltzer’s infamously nightmarish run of terrible spoof movies such as Epic Movie and Meet the Spartans categorically proved, simply regurgitating cliches and punchlines isn’t sufficient to qualify as comedy; there needs to be some unexpected manner of subversion. To that token, Coffee & Kareem largely just points out the absurdities of the buddy cop genre while forgetting to actually tell a joke, and even when an attempt is made, most of these gags have already been done countless times over the years.
Yet this isn’t in any way a torturous film to sit through, it’s simply an uninspired and totally unmemorable piece of work. The performances, at least, are faintly amusing; Helms could play the role of aloof toolbag cop in his sleep, and so it’s little surprise that Coffee could basically be what The Office‘s Andy Bernard eventually dovetailed into.
Young Gardenhigh’s potty-mouth shtick may grate on occasion, but that’s more the fault of the script than the actor, who does about as much as could be requested of the part, and the contrast between his ribald demeanour and Coffee’s more reserved tenor does make for a few fun moments.
Taraji P. Henson is meanwhile mostly wasted here as the doting mother, though she is given a few intermittent moments to flout her action chops, ultimately giving a more badass turn than she did in the wildly disappointing exploitation dud Proud Mary. But the show is unequivocally stolen by Betty Gilpin, who is remarkable as Coffee’s arrogant yet preternaturally skilled colleague, Detective Watts.
Gilpin, who is fast developing a habit for elevating mediocre movies with her sardonic charms, is given the floor to deliver an increasingly manic and demented performance, especially in the movie’s go-for-broke third act. She masticates the dialogue so ferociously that, even when it’s still not terribly funny, she’s the single element of the movie that actually retains residence in one’s mind after the credits roll.
The third reel as a whole is easily the most interesting segment, raising the puerile tone with an unexpectedly brutal death scene that’s presented in extreme and unexpected enough fashion to surely repulse as many as it amuses. It feels undeniably out of step with pretty much everything else here, but works well enough as intentionally jolting shock value.
All in all, Coffee & Kareem isn’t a good movie in any way, but it’s easy to see how some may appreciate it as a naff, undemanding comfort in the current global predicament. It’s entertainingly cringe-worthy at times, runs short, and moves fast, so it could certainly be a lot worse, even if with a tighter script this actually could’ve been an irreverent blast.
An almost entirely forgettable buddy cop romp, save for Betty Gilpin’s amusingly bug-eyed, scenery-gnawing performance.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★
Shaun Munro – Follow me on Twitter for more film rambling.
