‘Coffee & Kareem’ stirs up laughs
Coffee & Kareem Not rated. Running time: 88 minutes. Debuts today on Netflix streaming. out of 4
We’re reviewing movies here, not prescribing medicine, but it strikes me that “Coffee & Kareem” is a movie we could use right now. It’s funny, an action comedy that comes into your house in a good mood and gets the reaction it’s supposed to get: Laughs.
It casts Ed Helms as Officer Coffee, the most unlikely cop since Barney Fife on “The Andy Griffith Show” and pairs him with a foul-mouthed 12-year-old boy who appears to be smarter than he is. It’s a pretty hard-edged comedy, with violence as outsized as its humor: There’s an explosion dismemberment scene that’s played for laughs — some will shriek with laughter, and others will just shriek. Most will just appreciate the diversion.
Here’s something to think about: People like to believe that their opinions are not fluid entities that can be influenced by context. See a movie today or last week or last month, and it wouldn’t matter; we’d feel the same. But that’s not really true.
We know, for example, that it’s common for people to see movies on airplanes and love them, and then see the same movie again and say, “Eh” — and that the reverse happens, as well. The reason is that, on an airplane, people are more appreciative of entertainment, and yet at the same time, they’re not necessarily in the mood for complexity.
Well, “Coffee & Kareem” might be the ideal airplane movie. It opens at a time when few people are flying, and yet when, oddly enough, many of us are feeling, on the ground, the way passengers often feel when in the air: A little jittery and easily distracted, stuck in one place and really hoping there’s no more turbulence. “Coffee and Kareem” is big and simple and funny enough to break through the distraction.
Helms plays a goodnatured goofball (his consistency from movie to movie is actually refreshing), a divorced man in a new relationship. He and the new woman, Vanessa (Taraji P. Henson) are in bed at her house one afternoon, when they hear a noise. The son, Kareem (Terrence Little Gardenhigh), has come home unexpectedly and has accidentally seen them.
Kareem is outraged, first that she’s seeing anyone at all; second, that she’s seeing a white guy, and third that she’s seeing a cop. When mom contrives for Coffee to pick Kareem up from school — she wants them to get to know each other — Kareem steers him to a scary Detroit neighborhood and tries to hire someone to kill him. Instead, Kareem ends up witnessing a murder, and he and Coffee go on the run from a dangerous gang with corrupt police connections.
The script is funny and nimble, finding humor in Gardenhigh’s relentlessness — young Kareem is a torrent of vulgarity — but also in little, absurd moments, as when Coffee listens to “Kiss On My List” and quietly ruminates, “What I’d give to meet John Oates.” (To explain why that’s funny would kill the joke.)
Betty Gilpin, who plays a tough cop — as competent as Coffee is inept — builds on the impression she made in “The Hunt,” as an actress who lives in the extremes. Here she gets comic mileage out of her absolute, unbridled and amused contempt for Coffee, while also suggesting that the woman she’s playing is borderline crazy.