"That's my partner, smarter than Batman!" - Kevin Smith's COP OUT trailer!

The headline quote is seriously the only part of the Cop Out trailer that belongs to Kevin Smith, or more accurately, the Kevin Smith we've known for the past 15 years. The rest is just so-un View Askew-like, that you almost can't believe he made it. I've followed the production behind Cop Out (formerly A Couple of Dicks) closely over the past year or so and Smith frequently made mention that what he was cutting was certainly different but still very much felt like it was one of his movies and that it carried his signature. Well, the jury is out on that one my friend. Not that I'm saying the trailer is bad (actually it is, but it's not because it's an out of his own universe film), I'm just saying, this doesn't carry his signature at all, which I found surprising... For a start, there's the opening! I never thought I would see the day that a trailer for one of his flicks would open with that bright Warner Bros. logo that swoops into an ominous, intense Tony Scott thriller score with high rising camera shots of New York, and then pitch itself as coming from the studio behind such "acclaimed police drama's as Dirty Harry, The Departed and Training Day"! And well, for a Kevin Smith movie, it's just doesn't look very funny. Tracy Morgan, curiously the Mel Gibson to Bruce Willis' Danny Glover in the star structure of this movie, seems to be channeling the Chris Tucker style of comedy. This movie looks like a bad American set version of the Rush Hour movies. Morgan, an actor I'm not really familiar with having never really watched 30 Rock, didn't make me laugh once here. Then there's the Bruce Willis that turned up for this movie, and his ever changing mood. Some scenes (the days he got up and could be bothered it seems) he looks up for it, charismatic, charming and likeable, you know Bruce Willis, others he seems disinterested, disengaged and for Smith - disappointing in the reading of the material. You know what it is? It's his eyes, they give him away and you can tell he has his lunch break or something else on his mind.

Visually, the movie looks nice and Smith doesn't embarrass himself in the action scenes. It's just as a whole, the package ain't doing any awful lot for me right now. Cop Out opens on February 22nd in the U.K. and U.S.