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I'm always up for a new film by Kevin Smith, the director of "Clerks," "Dogma," and "Chasing Amy." Whatever lark he's tossing off, you can usually count on enjoying the sound of Smith's Preston Sturges-meets-Ron Jeremy dialogue, a form of wordplay so scrappy and alive it could never have come out of some Hollywood hack's screenwriting software.

In "Cop Out," however, Smith has set himself a special challenge. The movie is a barely satirical tribute to the interracial buddy-cop flicks that flourished in the 1980s, and that means Smith is trying to imitate some of the most machine-tooled wise-guy banter in the history of cinema.

In "Cop Out," I hoped that Kevin Smith would take this genre and run with it, injecting his own profane flights of observation. Instead, working for the first time from a script he didn't write, he imitates
everything about movies like "Running Scared" and the "Lethal Weapon" series that's now best forgotten: the slovenly plots and jackhammer action, which Smith can't stage worth a lick.

What he misses is what made those movies fun and, in the case of "48 HRS" classic: the testy, back-and-forth hostility between black and white crime-fighting partners.

Bruce Willis, all coolheaded reserve, is so Zen here he barely mirks, or acts, and Tracy Morgan never stops shouting in baby-voiced hysteria. These two go through their shtick like buddy-comedy robots. In the Obama era, their squabbling seems quaintly dated.

The one bright spot in "Cop Out" is Seann William Scott, who plays the thief who steals the baseball card that Willis needs to finance his daughter's wedding.

This is the Joe Pesci role, but Scott, scruffy to the max, with the glittery eyes of a happy sociopath, uses his eager, boyish quickness knowingly. He's a goofball dude, all right, but a dude with danger -- a flake who's a real lethal weapon.