I took in The Other Guys today and liked it a lot.  I thought it was very funny up until this very bizarre and misplaced end credits sequence infuriated me.  Before I should go on, I just want to say that there will be semi-spoilers for The Other Guys coming up.  I will try not to give too much away but if you don’t want any vague hints and you want to go in fresh, stop reading now.



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Moviefone ran an article explaining how this all went down.  Adam McKay is a known liberal and while I agree politically, I will be the first in line to re-elect Barack Obama in November 2012, it felt really out of place to me.  Perhaps the biggest problem is the music which is the agitprop rockers Rage Against the Machine’s cover of Bob Dylan’s “Maggie’s Farm.”  I am fan of Rage Against the Machine but it felt out of place with what had come before.  While there is a political undertone to the movie, it isn’t there enough to warrant that song.  If this had been a film like Chicago 10, I would have loved it because it would have suited the style of the film.  I was about to write in my review how subtle the political undertones are and how McKay didn’t hit us over the head with his message, until the final scene.  If this had been a Michael Moore film, it would have been perfect, but it’s not.

‘The Other Guys’ is a parody of old-school buddy-cop movies like the ‘Lethal Weapon’ films, but director/co-writer Adam McKay wanted to give it a realistically grandiose and relevant villain, which is the reason he turned to Wall Street. “All those old movies had drug-smuggling story lines — if you did that now, it would be quaint,” McKay told Entertainment Weekly earlier this summer. “Who gives a s— about guys selling drugs at this point? Crime has taken on massive proportions: destroying the Gulf of Mexico, stealing $80 billion. Stealing a billion dollars is nothing now — that’s almost adorable.”

So McKay approached Picture Mill, the design firm whose creative director, William Lebeda, has done the credit sequences for all of McKay’s movies. Lebeda tells Moviefone that he and his team brainstormed half a dozen ideas and brought them to McKay, “and this is the one that really stuck.”

“There was not a lot of finger-pointing in the movie. He felt this was his opportunity to point the finger,” Lebeda says. “It brought reality to the comedy,” adds David Midgen, who produced the sequence.

That’s all well in good but this wasn’t a finger pointing kind of movie.  This was a very funny take on the buddy cop film with political undertones.  I admire McKay’s attempt at working some political undertones into the film and he is clearly a smart guy.  In fact, for his next collaboration with Will Ferrell, I would love to see him do a full on political satire.  Can you imagine Ferrell as a corrupt senator?  I am laughing already just thinking about it.

With that all being said, the sequence is effective and well put together, even if it is a bit heavy handed.  I would suggest checking out the sequence now online, instead of seeing it in the theaters.  The sequence itself gives away no spoilers and it is well put together and effective, removed from it’s context.