Movie Review - Coffee & Kareem

Director Michael Dowse made a film last year called Stuber (2019), which was essentially a buddy cop flick. This film is also a buddy cop flick, and in a lot of ways it feels as if Dowse has made the same thing all over again. Yet, if you thought the premise for Stuber was ridiculous and the pairing of a cop with a non-cop couldn't get any sillier, this film disproves that and arguably lowers the bar. Aside from Stuber, there are other films from last year that this one mimicks. If one has seen Good Boys (2019) and Black and Blue (2019), this film is basically a combination of those two features. Good Boys is about taking prepubescent children and giving them the raunchiest things to say, the worst potty mouths ever. Black and Blue is about tackling police corruption with a good officer being framed and being on the run by drug-dealing and murderous boys in badges.

Ed Helms (Vacation and The Hangover) stars as James Coffee, a police officer who works for Detroit Metro. Other officers who work there mock him for not being a good police officer. Yet, in his co-workers' minds, him not being a good police officer means that he's not aggressive enough. His claim to infamy is that he let a prisoner escape police custody. Others mock him because they say he should have shot the prisoner. Yet, James didn't want to shoot an unarmed black man. There are other things he could have done to prevent the prisoner from escaping, but people insist that he wasn't aggressive or tough enough. It's more or less an attack on his masculinity and the toxic masculinity seemingly required to survive or simply succeed on the streets.

Terrence Little Gardenhigh (Danger Force and Henry Danger) co-stars as Kareem Manning, a 12-year-old who is the son of James' girlfriend. Like the kids in Good Boys, Kareem says the most profane and the most vulgar things all the time. Actually, the kids in Good Boys aren't constantly saying profane or vulgar things. They know to dial it back. Kareem though is always spitting out the raunchiest stuff. He's almost not a 12-year-old but a 30-year-old comedian in the things that he says. He has no filter anywhere, not even in school.

Later, it's suggested that his raunchy or what is his aggressive way that he talks and acts is nothing more than a defense mechanism. It's meant to mask insecurity that comes from his life as an only child to a single mother or it comes from his life as a black kid in what could be deemed the ghetto or streets of an impoverished, urban area. It comes from his indoctrination, as it were, from listening or perceiving rap music or hip hop culture. I think this point is better made in films like Chris Robinson's Beats (2019) or even going way back to films like Menace II Society (1993) or the classic Boyz n the Hood (1991).

Taraji P. Henson (Hidden Figures and Hustle & Flow) also co-stars as Vanessa Manning, the mother to Kareem. She's actually the one who makes the point about how the behavior of the black men in this film, including that of her own son, is just a defense mechanism or a way to mask their insecurities. She makes that point at the end of the film though. For the majority of the runtime, she's sidelined. She's given a couple of scenes to shine and to add to the comedy, but it's increasingly evident that she should have been the "buddy" to this buddy cop film. She should have been the one tagging along with James and Kareem.

Like the recent animated film Onward (2020), the point is to underscore male bonding yet again, as the most important aspect, so that perhaps this young black kid can be shown a positive male role model. It's perhaps problematic that the role model is a white man when the role model clearly should be his mother. It could be argued that the son is already bonded to the mother, which is why he goes to extremes to protect her. Yet, it could be equally argued that he's disconnected from her and what she's feeling, mostly due to her keeping her relationship to James a secret, so having a black mother bond on an adventure with her son would have been great to see. The series Raising Dion (2019) scratched that itch a bit, but we could certainly have more black mother and black son bonding.

If Henson's presence had been more of a thing, we probably would have got a lot less of the homophobic language and even more homophobic scenes in this film. In a couple of Dowse's previous narratives, he managed to incorporate a gay character. In Goon (2012), Dowse had the sibling to the main character be gay. In Stuber, one of the main characters meets a male stripper who's gay and gives him some good advice. Here, a gay character was needed to counterbalance all the blatant homophobia. At one point, Kareem specifically says that in order to scare people you have to say things that are gay or that imply same-sex relations. Later, James pretends to be gay with the express purpose of scaring a straight man. When the underlying joke is that being gay is a threat or something of which to be scared, that is the definition of homophobia.

Rated TV-MA.
Running Time: 1 hr. and 28 mins.

Available on Netflix.