Twelve year old Kareem isn’t impressed with his mom’s new boyfriend, police officer James Coffee (Ed Helms) of the Detroit PD. Kareem is a lot of things but passive aggressive isn’t one of them, so his not-so-subtle hint basically involves hiring a criminal to “scare” Coffee dead, or paralyzed from the waist down at least. I know what you’re thinking: sounds like a good plan. And it almost would have been had Kareem not involved an actual criminal, which gets both he and Coffee into some pretty hot trouble.

The worst part is now they’ll have to work together to escape Detroit’s most notorious drug lord, and perhaps scarier still, explain to Kareem’s mom Vanessa (Taraji P. Henson) just where the heck they’ve been.

This is the buddy cop movie 2020’s been asking for: white cop with a molester mustache and a black kid running amok in a city that has more bad neighbourhoods than good. How else are we going to cure racism?

And it’s the movie we’ve all been craving when we’re on week 3 of our quarantine: funny. I know, it’s rare for a comedy lately to score actual laughs, and the humour in this is admittedly pretty crude (especially the stuff coming from the kid’s mouth), so some might be dissuaded and that’s okay. But neither of these guys has ever met a situation they couldn’t accidentally make worse.

This is not a thinking man’s comedy. It isn’t smart or clever, and it falters every time it tries to be. It’s some madcap fun with fairly unlikable characters, and a pretty generous pour of action and adventure. There’s no lack of violence and there’s some pretty fun new takes on car chases that might just win them some points. But mostly it’s just some mindless chicanery with a side of explosive gore, and right now, I’m not asking for much more.