The history of race-focused buddy-cop action-comedies goes something like this: two disparate people from disparate backgrounds—usually an asshole police officer and a person of color, who isn’t a cop (think “48 Hours“)—are unexpectedly thrust together when some crime goes awry. Through plot machinations, these two unlikely partners— usually detesting one another for various reasons, racial divide being key— are forced to solve the mystery behind said crime while bickering constantly and trying not to get killed in the process. “Coffee & Kareem,” director Michael Dowse‘s oafish, painfully shallow and vulgar riff on this idea for Netflix is essentially the same concept, with a little bit “Kindergarten Cop” mixed in for what he believes is good measure. It pits an inept white cop (Ed Helms) against the crass and unruly tweenage son (Terrence Little Gardenhigh) of the African-American woman he’s dating (Taraji P. Henson) and tries to interject ideas of unlikely father figures and bad role models into a mix intended to be funny and action-packed, yet failing miserably at both.
Officer Coffee seems like a good guy. He’s a cop for all the right reasons. He’s a loving, sensitive romantic partner. And he desperately wants to connect in the right way with his new girlfriend’s young son. Unfortunately, her young son, the foul-mouthed Kareem, doesn’t want to give the cop a shot, and instead, attempts to hire a murderous drug dealer to kill Officer Coffee because the kid accidentally stumbled into the house while the two adults were having sex. After inadvertently witnessing incriminating felonies when he seeks out the drug dealer, Kareem is forced to team up with Coffee to survive and save his mother. And hopefully, along the way, the two can develop a bond.
The premise, in theory, isn’t actually terrible. But as boxers have said for years, fights don’t happen on paper. And, over the course of the brief, but still interminable 88-minute, the execution of this decent concept is brutally tone-deaf and odious. From numerous jokes about sexual molestation between the two main characters, to the offensive gay jokes, to the sexual harrassment/#MeToo humor that the filmmaker felt was perfectly okay as long as a female made them, “Coffee & Kareem” will likely have you amazed at just how humorless a comedy can be.
And when those lame jokes are bad enough, as you might have guessed from the terribly punny title, “Coffee & Kareem” digs its ditch even deeper with all its racist humor. “Racial humor,” is a hallmark of the great buddy-cop comedies — “48 Hours,” “Lethal Weapon,” and “Rush Hour” — are just a few films that are able to mine gold from that iffy idea. But that was a much different era and regardless, the bigoted humor in this Netflix film is just awful. The two main characters are drawn with the broadest brush. Coffee is every white guy from a classic ‘Chappelle Show’ skit, but somehow more naive and idiotic. Kareem is written as if by your 85-year-old white grandma from Alabama who thinks all black teenagers are basically the Fox News version of Trayvon Martin.
Unsurprisingly, the only characters that subvert expectations and play the race-baiting, controversial jokes in a unique way, are the Black henchmen characters who are in touch with their feelings and often quote Dr. Phil. It’s the one area where some of the jokes actually land and elicit an errant giggle. Unfortunately, those characters are about 5% of the film, whereas the Coffee and Kareem portion of “Coffee & Kareem” is expected to carry the load.
And it’s with the character of Kareem, where the film really goes off whatever insufficient safeguards there are to prevent the film from becoming a total embarrassment. “Coffee & Kareem” clearly believes young kids dropping incessant F-bombs, talking about their big dicks, and how gross it is to be gay is inherently funny. Sure, occasionally a joke is just so juvenile it might elicit an audience grin or chuckle once, but Gardenhigh’s dialogue is just so desperate to appear edgy and provocative, it all just feels so painful.
Sadly, “Coffee & Kareem” can’t even be described as a one-off error in judgment from Dowse. When you take “Stuber” into account, his previous film, (as well of his many mainstream misses), it’s clear the director just doesn’t have a strong grasp on how to integrate raunch, action, and heart, despite clearly aiming to always mix the three, often amping up the first two and forgetting the latter. Similarily, “Stuber” also attempted to put a spin on the buddy-cop action-comedy formula by adding some would-be exciting, hard-R action and emotion into the design, yet the genre exercise is painfully pitiful. If Dowse’s previous film was a warning, “Coffee & Kareem” is the confirmation that the filmmaker is clearly on the wrong path and arguably has no clue.
Given bonding between the two warring leads is eventually necessary, what does a heartfelt moment in “Coffee & Kareem” look like? Officer Coffee takes the young Kareem to a strip club in the middle of the day and pays a dancer to talk to the child to help him overcome his fear of women. The scene ends with the dancer agreeing to show an underage kid her vagina for $5 and that’s the crass level of sophistication this ill-advised film operates on.
When not refreshed for modern times, buddy-cop action-comedies can feel excruciatingly out of date (see another recent Netflix film, “Spenser Confidential“), like a bad leftover from the ’80s half-heartedly reheated. Perhaps in the hands of someone like Hannibal Buress, Donald Glover, Eric Andre, Seth Rogen, Judd Apatow or someone of this ilk, perhaps this Netflix film could work. Under the leadership of Dowse, “Coffee & Kareem” is an unfunny, insensitive, exploitative mess that is awful from even the very first sip. [D-]