This movie is just awful. I really can’t say enough bad things about it.
On the surface, it seems like it would be good, because it has a lot of good actors in it. Ed Helms, Taraji P. Henson, Betty Gilpin, David Alan Grier.
But just as pizza, ice cream, orange juice, and Mountain Dew all taste good on their own, they are destined to explode into a pile of crap when you put them together.
The plot, if you can call it one, is that Ed Helms (Officer Coffee, given that unlikely name for no reason other than to create a catchy buddy comedy movie title) is dating Vanessa, the mother of the rambunctious and foul mouthed 12 year old, Kareem (Terrence Gardenhigh.)
Long story short, Kareem witnesses a murder, Coffee gets framed for it, and its a madcap romp to fight the bad guys and score the evidence that will get Coffee off the hook.
It sounds simple enough yet, it all falls apart at a comedic level. I don’t know when it became popular for kids to say raunchy things in movies. I’ve noticed it as a growing trend more and more in movies over the past decade. Someone, somewhere decided it would be funny to have a kid swear and say naughty things and then movies just kept upping the game, having kids swear more, saying naughtier things until you have this travesty.
Feel free to disagree, but I just think that having kids being foul mouthed for the camera is just gross, a stupid gimmick that Hollywood should have had enough decency to have never gotten involved with in the first place. How do none of the adults behind this movie not say, “Hey, kids shouldn’t be saying such terrible things and we shouldn’t make one do it for the camera?”
To be honest, I was going to switch it off in the first 20 minutes and I only stuck with it because of Betty Gilpin, who I think is an underrated national treasure, but even she couldn’t save this mess.
I don’t know what else to say. Rarely do I give a bad review, but Netflix should give subscribers a free month and a formal apology for making this crap.
STATUS: NOT SHELF WORTHY.
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