CHIPS

Watched this with low expectations as I had heard it wasn't great, but I was laughing through most of the film. Crude humour and cringingly awkward scenes made for a very entertaining movie.

Sometimes I have a hard time rating movies, and more specifically comedies. Because comedies generally try to do nothing other than make you laugh, it's easier to let plot and character development (etc) slide, as you might not with other genres of movies. This is the typical R rated comedy of this day and age - over the top, raunchy comedy that focuses mostly on human anatomy jokes. If you hate those movies, avoid it at all costs. If you like them, then you'll probably like this.

At the screening I saw this at just about everyone after the film was talking about how they liked it, and there was certainly a lot of laughter in the theater throughout the movie.

This movie had a few moments of truly laugh out loud hilarity, outside of those few moments the rest of the comedy was there, but it was pretty generic.

Look, you know what type of movie this is (raunchy comedy). If you go to the theater and drop your $ and don't like it, that's on you.

All too often people like to rag on movies like this. Not every movie to hit the cinema will be Oscar worthy, Not every movie will be written with a story that will move you to tears or challenge your thinking. Set your expectations for the movie you will see and you are less likely to be disappointed.

Chips is an entertaining cop buddy flick, rated R and has some adult humor. Both Pena and Shepard play their parts well and along the way the movie pokes fun at itself and the genre. There are plenty of laughs to be had here and overall the movie went at a steady pace. There is nothing ground breaking in it but I wanted a laugh, I got a laugh. Hopefully it does well enough at the box office to get a sequel.

Remember 21 Jump Street (2012)? Boy that was a fun movie. In many ways it was the perfect meta-commentary of the type of low-stakes, low-rent, low-brow crap Hollywood has been throwing at us recently like chimps in a mismanaged zoo. Literally anything and I mean anything with even a modicum of franchise potential is being made and remade and remade again these days. Thus when 21 Jump Street (based on a soapy cheap-looking TV show) reared its ugly head, I for one was clenching for an awful night at the cinema.

In many ways I was expecting something like Chips, i.e. an ill-conceived, aged and offensive grotesquery that at best is a watered down version of literally everything you've already seen. Remember all those completely forgetful Martin Lawrence clones that were hammered out one-by-one in the early 2000's? Me neither; how about those equally forgettable Kevin Hart movies? Okay, getting warmer. Well imagine that plus a big fat layer of tepid, lazy direction and you got the basic ingredients for what should honestly be renamed "Bullchips." Chips was directed, written and stars Dax Shepard who you may remember as the dude in Without a Paddle (2004) who was not Matthew Lillard or Seth Green. Here he plays Jon Baker, an over-the-hill Motocross athlete who, according to co-star Michael Pena, is "always two-beers too familiar." He's the typical California "dude" who's far too self-involved to notice he's a walking, talking stereotype. Or at least he is until the script asks him not to be.

Speaking of stereotypes, Michael Pena takes the place of the rambunctious Erik Estrada as Poncherello. In this universe he's an undercover FBI Agent searching for dirty cops, stolen loot and California dimes willing to give it up to the "Ponch". While it's easy to say Pena is the best part of this movie; saying that would be like complimenting the only cylinder firing on a broken motor.

Chips is based off the famed 1970's TV show which ran from 1977 until 1983. As you would expect from something that hasn't been figuratively opened since the 70's, this film is a festering gob of unrecognizable gunk. The police procedural portions of the film are rote and redundant while the duo-building moments of banter reek, of awkwardness and fragile male egoisms that haven't been funny since the Reagan Administration. Yet there they are, on the screen just begging audiences to laugh as Baker and Ponch discuss at length the preference and frequency of night-long a**-licking.

Aside from the film's boorish leads, Chips has a hard time communicating who or what we should actually care about. The audience is made aware of who our bad guys are long before our leads do, yet the film goes through so many airless, dimensionless minutes trying to coax our heroes in the right direction. Then the film goes into fruitless avenues to play out juvenile bits for the sake of little or no information pertinent to the story. Then, to add insult to injury they flip through a Highway Patrol database and randomly point to their bad guy because of nothing more than a mean look.

It gets worse. Shepard's Baker for example takes a lot in stride – His wife's obvious infidelity, his advanced age, Ponch's bathroom habits etc. He takes it all in stride with the exception of his work which he takes on with the vigor of a newly endowed meter maid. It's supposed to be a reoccurring joke yet because the movie is so shoddily edited there are so many, either setups that are never executed or comedic payoffs that seem to come out of nowhere. Then they simply drop it in favor of Ponch's romance, I guess with a fellow officer (Bock)? Through all the mired, half-realized nonsense, only one thing remains clear – Chips was trying, trying to follow the exact same playbook as 21 Jump Street. Yet while 21 Jump had the rare quality of being reliably absurd and self-referential, this thing is just a vulgar, incompetent mess with little worthwhile to say other than "watch out for yoga pants!"

I found "Chips" in the comedy section on Netflix, and not being familiar with it, I decided to give it a watch as I do enjoy comedies.

I was familiar with some of the cast, so I had somewhat of a bit of notion of what to expect from the movie. And I will say that "Chips" rose to the occasion and really delivered top notch comedy entertainment. I was genuinely entertained throughout the course of the entire movie.

"Chips" was a good combination of comedy and action, as well as having a good character gallery, which really made the movie come to life. Especially so since it was characters that you instantly bonded with and took a liking to.

I must admit that I am not overly keen on Dax Shepard usually, but he was really great in this movie and really carried his role quite well. But for me, then it was Michael Peña who carried the movie with his hilarious performance, and he was so greatly cast for the role. But there were also lots of other good performances throughout the movie.

There are many funny scenes in the movie, and they had me laughing heartily throughout the course of the movie. And the chemistry between Shepard and Peña was just phenomenal, both as actors but also their on-screen characters.

"Chips" is a gem in the comedy genre, and one that definitely need more recognition because it is just through and through entertaining and funny.