Morgan goes way overboard - foaming at the mouth to play the deranged Paul, a New York detective whose bizarre behavior earns a suspension for him and hard-nosed partner Jimmy (Willis).
Formula dictates that laughs arise from the friction between wacky Paul and his straight-arrow partner, but Smith, probably wisely, junks the blueprint and encourages his stars to find laughs wherever they can.
There are times when this freewheeling approach creates a surreal, absurdist tone, and when the movie finds it, it finds laughs, with contributions from Susie Essman, Seann William Scott, Adam Brody and Kevin Pollack.
Other bit players are wasted - "Cop Out" squanders Rashida Jones ("I Love You, Man") in a bland role as the put-upon wife of the paranoid Paul, an apparent example of the hazards the movie encounters when it sticks to the page.
That's also true of a subplot that has Jimmy chafing at his ex-wife's smug second husband (Jason Lee), and it goes double for all material related to Jimmy's pursuit of a valuable baseball card, which ends up in the hands of a Mexican drug lord (Guillermo Diaz, trying to make Al Pacino in "Scarface" look subtle).
There's nothing in "Cop-Out," storywise, that's half as interesting as the saga surrounding Smith's battle with Southwest Airlines, the company that kicked him off a flight for being too large. Or as funny as Smith's podcast response, posted on his View Askew Web site.
