I want you all to know that, if I mysteriously disappear sometime in the next few days, it was probably Kevin Smith.

Thing is, I'm about to say some bad things about his latest movie. Of course, we critics do this all the time and face no repercussions whatsoever, with the occasional exception of getting challenged to boxing matches by Uwe Boll. But this is the Internet. If you invoke Kevin Smith's name online, he has the habit of appearing, Bloody Mary-like, to dole out his vengeance in ways that would shock and dismay even the most tubgirl-hardened Internet denizens.

-- Local show times, theaters, trailer.

So let it be known, Mr. Smith, I much liked both Clerks movies and Mallrats, and just earlier today a tale of poor driving allowed me to drop the line about the bear from the Clerks cartoons. But to paraphrase a line from Futurama, there's parts of Kevin Smith's work I like and parts I don't like. Cop Out is among the latter.

After fouling up a drug investigation, play-by-their-own-rules cops Bruce Willis and Tracy Morgan are suspended without pay for a month. Struggling to pay for his daughter's wedding, Willis tries to sell an ultra-rare baseball card, but gets robbed on his way to the buyer by fancy-stepping thief Seann William Scott.

Willis and Morgan's unauthorized pursuit nabs Scott. But he's already sold the card — to violent drug maven and massive baseball fan Guillermo Diaz, the thug behind the investigation that cost Morgan and Willis their badges.

The first few seconds of Cop Out are pretty funny. Then Morgan, who's usually pretty great, spends a minor eternity bellowing quotes from other movies at a suspect while Willis helpfully rattles off which film each quote is from. This establishes two things: 1) Cop Out is some sort of homage to the buddy cop movies of the '80s, and 2) it's a ridiculous goddamn mess in desperate need of a rewrite and a much crueler editor.

It's got genuine laughs, yes. This must not be overlooked. But for every laugh, there are 10 groans or that little swooshy sound a rolling pair of eyes makes if you get your ear up real close to them. A lot of the gags feel tired, faddish.

Not to mention the whole "buddy cops tearing across town in a consequence-free environment" thing is so played out I swear I've typed this exact sentence before. (A shiny quarter to whoever digs it out of the archives first!) Director Kevin Smith makes an effort to remind us this is an homage to the genre instead of an uninspired recycling job, but there's no rearrangement of the Beverly Hills Cop theme powerful enough to turn Cop Out into the kind of loving spoof Shaun of the Dead was for zombies.

Besides, if that was the goal here, that movie's already been made! It's called Hot Fuzz, and it's great.

Cop Out's shotgun-blast approach to comedy — some hits, more misses, a great bloody mess — isn't assisted by writers Robb and Mark Cullen's meandering plot. Their story is looser than the waistband of the boxers you've been wearing for the last week. Add these factors together and its 107-minute duration feels as long as a lifetime.

Not a human one, either, I'm talking elves, and have you ever seen an old elf? No. The same "No" you'd supply to the question "Other than making you laugh at a fraction of its jokes, does Cop Out succeed at any of the things it sets out to do?"

Grade: D