Amusing, mostly. This flick is more a collection of moments rather than a cohesive comedic story. You could say that about the original police squad show and its sequel movies too, but they tended to hold together better than this work. Of course, those shows had the benefit of coming from the Zucker/Abrahams team, who were demonstrably comedic geniuses, whereas this film comes from a group of mostly nobodies. The difference in pedigree may be the source of the problem, as there’s just something missing in a lot of this plot; generally, the jokes take too much time to land, and then the movie lingers on them too long. These guys don’t seem to understand that a film like this requires a machine gun approach, not being satisfied with a good line or visual here and there. Liam Neeson and (particularly, maybe surprisingly) Pamela Anderson do the best they can with the material, and there are a few moments of laugh out loud hilarity—including one sequence that’s actually cribbed from an Austin Powers movie—but not enough good moments to make it seem like this reboot was all that necessary. If you’re looking to be a screw up, you’d better be a great screw up—otherwise, everyone will think you just don’t know what you’re doing.
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