This is looking seriously good. Starring Bruce Willis & Tracy Morgan (30 Rock) as two cops tracking down a vintage baseball card. May not sound like much but there is more going on (and I don’t want to spoil it for you).

The trailer really won’t spoil much either, it just shows you what appears to be a brilliant chemistry between Willis and Morgan, a great cameo from Seann William-Scott and some excellent moments that you would only find in a Kevin Smith film. Cop Out looks like it is trying to be the modern day Lethal Weapon but Kevin Smith is very good at what he does and Cop Out certainly won’t be a poor imitation. It’s definitely going to come into it’s own and I am very excited.

Here’s the two minute, forty six second trailer for you. I got some laughs out of this, so it’s doing something right.

Unfortunately, Cop Out is out on the April 16th in the UK, with a US release date of February 26th.

The movie takes place in a future (which is actually only eight years from now) where humanity recluses itself indoors (more so than now) to experience a utopian reality through supermodel robots. The robots, called surrogates, feel no pain, fatigue, or emotions and allow the operator to live life in god-mode. I learned that the surrogates send sensory perceptions to the user, but I don’t understand how the robot can block out pain? Is the surrogate even sensitive/aware of the difference? Anyway, Bruce Willis stars as FBI agent Tom Greer who is investigating the murder of the son of the scientist who invented the whole surrogacy technology to begin with. The son was using a surrogate at the time and was killed by a never before seen weapon, one that is able to murder the human behind the surrogate. The FBI are obviously concerned about this weapon and put Willis to the task of finding it, that is, until Willis is suspended for political red tape. As all good cops would, Willis continues his investigation without the approval of the FBI, and this time, since it was destroyed in a chase, without the protection of his surrogate. Experiencing reality in his true form, he is susceptible to the dangers and hazards of real life.

That is the main plot of the movie, and it has a few twists and surprises to keep the audiences attention. From my seat, I could not stop wondering about how people are able to accept these stand-in robots. How can the world accept the fact that the person they are looking at may not actually look like that for real? For example, there is a scene in which Bruce Willis questions a techie about an issue with the surrogates relating to the case and the techie is a tall black man with very nice teeth, but his security photo shows him to be a bald dorky white guy. Another example, Bruce Willis is interrogating a spokesman for the corporation which produces the surrogates when he loses his patience and says to the very attractive woman “honey…for all I know you can be some fat dude sitting in a stim chair with his dick hanging out.” Good line, but he asks a serious question. How can anyone accept the fact that they don’t know the identity of the person controlling the surrogate in front of them? Wouldn’t the police have a great deal of trouble searching for perpetrators? And what if just for fun two guys switch robots for a day? No one would have any idea. Maybe the movie did not make the answers to my questions clear, and I guess the mechanics behind the society in the movie was not the whole point of the film. Nevertheless, I was distracted by these questions.

I suppose a good quality was the criticism the film was making about this sort of behavior. It seemed to encourage people to enjoy life for what it is instead of hiding behind technology or other safety nets. The wife of Agent Greer was emotionally fragile and she used her surrogate to escape her suffering. The relationship between Greer and his wife is strained because of her dependency on the robot and we find that life in this world is not as perfect as everyone pretends it to be. Other operators are revealed throughout the movie to show us how pathetic and frail their lives are without the surrogates. We also see how unattractive everyone really is compared to the pristine perfect surrogate they operate. A world like that would make any self-conscious person mentally collapse! I guess that is why so many people purchased the surrogates in the first place? Once one person had one, everyone must have felt inadequate.

Ving Rhames has a role in the film as the leader of the community of humans who refuse to use surrogates. They call him “The Prophet” (very creative). I wish they brought Denis Leary to be the all-man’s man like his character in Demolition Man instead. When Bruce Willis and Ving Rhames met in the film I was waiting for Zed and the Gimp to come out, but let’s not talk about that (Pulp Fiction reference for those not in the know).

While these were the things diverting me from really immersing myself in the movie, I did not mind it. The ending was not so bad either and the choice Bruce Willis found himself in made me smile. Not because it was spectacular, but just because it was such an easy fix to all his problems. What are the odds a guy with his dilemma would find himself in the position to change it so dramatically? I don’t want to give away too much but it was rather incidental.

Truly I wish it had more depth or at least more action to compensate. Yet Surrogates is an alright movie and I did watch the whole thing (unlike Bruno which sucked). In the caste of science fiction it is certainly no kshatriya, but it might be good for a viewing one evening during the weekday. I say watch it once and see what you think.

Two stars. One for Butch and one for Marsellus Wallace.

Rating: ★★☆☆☆