If you can remember the '80s, Hollywood thinks you’re too old to be going to the movies. How else to explain Cop Out, a movie where the tag line might as well be “1986 called – it wants its script back”.

Presumably somebody thought that by teaming Bruce Willis with 30 Rock’s Tracy Morgan somehow some kind of cinematic magic would take place and all the clapped-out clichés of the long-dead buddy cop genre would magically seem fresh and new. Didn’t happen. And maybe that same somebody thought that by hiring Kevin Smith (Clerks, Chasing Amy) to direct, the comedy would somehow take on the edge that made the first 48 Hours film such a classic. Didn’t happen.

What did happen was scene after scene after scene that, while sort of entertaining when considered individually, soon take on a dully predictable rhythm as it becomes obvious that there are no surprises whatsoever on offer here. Still, the story itself moves along nicely as Jim (Willis) and his partner Paul (Morgan) run around Brooklyn trying to get back Jim’s fifty thousand dollar baseball card and maybe take down a Mexican crime lord on the side. And at first seeing Morgan doing his patented stream-of-consciousness babble while supposedly being a cop is kind of funny (the opening interrogation scene where his “bad cop” act consists of ripped off lines from every movie ever made is pretty good).

Then it turns out that this movie has nothing else for him to do.

Willis, on the other hand, doesn’t even get that much: he just gets to be the same tough guy / angry dad (he’s selling the baseball card so he, and not his daughter’s sleazy stepfather, can pay for her wedding) that he always plays. Basically, Willis plays his Die Hard character and Morgan plays his 30 Rock character, only Cop Out is nowhere near as exciting or funny as either.

Everything else here is recycled: there’s a cute girl that the Mexican mob want dead (she falls for Paul, for no reason whatsoever), the mob boss keeps killing his own men, Jim and Paul have a pair of less edgy detectives cleaning up their messes, and so on - but a special shout-out goes to the angry captain who puts our heroes on suspension because of their crazy, shooting-up-the-streets behaviour. This is a cliché that’s been openly mocked since at least the early 1990s Schwarzenegger flop The Last Action Hero, but here? Not a joke.

The only real stand-out in the entire film is Seann William Scott as the world’s most annoying cat burglar: the scene where he taunts Morgan to the brink of insanity is by far the best thing in this film. While an entire movie where they teamed up might not be tolerable by human beings, at least it’d be memorable ... which isn’t a term anyone’ll be using to describe Cop Out any time soon.

Cop Out opens in cinemas today (Thursday, March 18).
You can view the Cop Out movie trailer here on TheVine.