Coffee & Kareem (2020)

WARNING:  I’m going to give away some minor spoilers.  It’s nothing that you shouldn’t see coming, but I feel it only fair to mention this now.

There are probably a lot of movies that look better as a script.  One might imagine that the finished product will be funny or action-packed, but words don’t always translate well to the screen.  I think Coffee & Kareem was looking for a Hot Fuzz kind of feel that it just couldn’t pull off.

The movie is about a police officer, James Coffee, who’s dating one Vanessa Manning.  Her son, Kareem, notices them having sex.  Kareem isn’t too fond of Coffee, mostly because he’s a police officer.  What does Kareem do?  His plan is to get Orlando Johnson, notorious criminal, to kill Coffee.

Kareem actually has Coffee drive him to where Johnson is hiding.  He then offers to pay Johnson in change, which he keeps in a sock.  Oh, and Kareem’s recording the whole thing for his YouTube channel.  Having once been 12 myself, I realize this probably makes total sense to Kareem.

Things go horribly sideways when Kareem witnesses the shooting of a corrupt police officer.  His only protection is the inept police officer who let Johnson escape in the first place.  The two end up on the run and trip over every cliché a buddy-cop movie has to offer.

You can actually see a lot of them coming.  In escaping from Johnson initially, Kareem drops his phone.  Of course he does.  Why not?  Doesn’t the main character drop the one key piece of evidence?  It’s not his house keys.  Maybe it’s his wallet, so the criminals know where he lives.  But if something gets dropped, it’s going to be the key piece of evidence.

Coffee calls his captain to report corruption and has him meet at a strip club with Kareem.  If a phone call is made requesting a meeting, one of the two people involved usually ends up dead.  If a by-the-books police officer calls a trusted officer to report corruption, you’d better bet the trusted officer is also corrupt.  So, yeah.  Captain Hill meets with Coffee and it turns out that he’s corrupt.  Then, Hill gets shot.  And Coffee is framed for Hill’s murder and for the murder of the other corrupt officer.  It’s too bad that Kareem dropped the key piece of evidence.

Most of the characters are varying degrees of inept.  In Kareem’s case, we can attribute this to the fact that he’s 12.  You’re not expected to make rational decisions at that age.  Some people can at that age, but that tends to be the exception.  Coffee is just a bumbling idiot.  If the movie took place in a small town, he’d be the police chief’s nephew or something.  This is Detroit.  How did he make it through the academy?

I would say that that the only character that has it all together is Vanessa.  Unfortunately, we don’t see enough of her.  I think it would have been better to pair Coffee with Vanessa instead of Kareem.  But, then we couldn’t have that bad pun of a movie title.  What we end up with is the Dumb and Dumber of buddy cop movies.

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Stuber (2019)

I remember someone once saying about the character, Frasier Crane, that no psychiatrist would ever act that way.  Any professional therapist would lose their license if they did a tenth of what Dr. Crane did during the run of the series.  This isn’t to say that the show wasn’t funny.  Much of the humor came from someone so intelligent being largely clueless.  The humor came from that disparity.

I don’t think that Stuber was going for that dynamic, though.  Vic Manning would seem to be your typical renegade police officer.  He shoots from the hip and maybe grunts out a few questions later.  The movie starts with Vic and his partner, Sara Morris, trying to take down Oka Tedjo, who sells drugs to kids.   Tedjo gets away, leaving Sara to die.

Cut to some time later.  Tedjo is still on the run.  Vic is still on the job, but his vision isn’t what it used to be.  This leads him to get laser eye surgery, which does require some down time.  Wouldn’t you know it?   Someone gets a lead on Tedjo, prompting Vic to spring into action.  Since he can’t drive, he has to rely on the Uber app, which his daughter thoughtfully installed for him.

Enter Stu, a driver with a 4.1 rating.  His main job is at a sports store; he does Uber for some extra cash.  Vic has Stu drive all over town looking for the next clue that will lead them to their target.  I doubt very much that any police department would allow an officer to put a civilian in the line of fire like this, to say nothing of paying for it.  But, here Stu is, desperately hoping for a five-star rating.

The main problem with the story is that there isn’t much of one.  Movies like Beverly Hills Cop had a pretty solid storyline.  This looked like someone wanted to see how closely they could stick to a template and still get greenlit.  I’d worry about giving away the plot, but anyone watching the movie could probably guess what’s coming next.

For instance, there are two running gags: Stu’s rating and Vic’s eyesight.  The entire reason Vic can string Stu along is the threat of a low rating.  (Stu states that dropping below a 4.0 average gets him kicked off the app.  I don’t know if this is true.)  The entire reason Vic even needs someone is that he literally can‘t see well past his nose.  There’s also Stu’s friend, Becca, who constantly calls him to hook up.  Stu promises that he’ll be right there, thinking that Vic couldn’t possibly need him that much longer.

The funny thing is that the movie doesn’t really feel like a rip off of a particular movie.  It’s more like the most basic entry possible into the genre.  This puts me in the awkward position of sort of liking it because I can’t find any particular fault with it.  It hit many of the marks, but was also kind of basic.

Vic and Stu get into a fight at the sporting-goods store, which sort of deals with toxic masculinity, but doesn’t do a great job of it.  Vic is also not a great father to his daughter, Nicole.  She’s thoughtful enough to put the app on her father’s phone.  Vic isn’t thoughtful enough to try to make it to his daughter’s art opening.  (He winds up there by chance.)

When I left the movie, I felt entertained.  However, it didn’t really have anything new or clever about it.  This isn’t going to make my list of top-ten police movies.  I don’t think it will make any of my top-ten lists.  It’s the kind of movie I’d tell you to rent if your Netflix queue is running low or Redbox is out of your first choice.  It’s probably going to be better than watching nothing, but I don’t expect you’d rent it a second time.

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