5 Hateworthy Buddy Comedies That Give Friendship A Bad Name

5 The Man

If you have only one chance to see a Samuel L. Jackson/Eugene Levy buddy comedy, try not to make it The Man (even though, technically, it’s the only Samuel L. Jackson/Eugene Levy buddy comedy). Jackson is a badass cop and Levy is Eugene Levy — that’s pretty much all you need to know about the plot. “At what point do you know that a movie isn't just bad, it’s off-the-scale, surrender-all-hope, no-turning-back bad?” asked the Toronto Star. Ebert & Roeper’s Richard Roeper could barely muster the effort to type his review: “So tired.”

4 Wild Hogs

If two buddies are funny, four should be extra crispy, right? Not if you put midlife (and mid-career) crisis Tim Allen, John Travolta, William H. Macy and Martin Lawrence on Harleys and send them out on the open road in search of their missing testosterone. Protect your brain and avoid what The Guardian called a “mind-sodomisingly mediocre family comedy.”

3 Wild Wild West

Now here’s an interesting pair of buddies — Kevin Kline and Will Smith as Secret Service agents in the Old West. But it isn’t long before the film is overwhelmed by steampunk special effects — by the time the monstrous mechanical spider shows up, you know this throwback farce has descended into the depths of comedy hell. The Orlando Sentinel didn’t hold back: “It's the disappointment of the summer, the worst TV adaptation in recent memory and, almost needless to say, a fiasco of cosmic proportions.”

2 Stuck on You

Buddies don’t get much closer than Matt Damon and Greg Kinnear, brothers who are literally joined at the hip… er, general shoulder area? Bad taste comes with the territory when you’re talking Farrelly Brothers movies, but this one lays on the treacly sentiment without the compensatory laughs. “A strangely lackluster, flaccid string of fitfully humorous episodes,” panned Seattle Times. 

1 Cop Out

None of the buddy stuff works in Cop Out, with Tracy Morgan and Bruce Willis struggling through a movie in which “desperation oozes from every frame,” according to Time Out. Even worse was the funny buddy relationship between Willis and director/fanboy Kevin Smith. “I wasn’t the 38-year-old Kevin Smith who had directed a bunch of movies; I was the 12-year-old who would lay on my parents’ couch and watch David Addison on Moonlighting on Tuesday,” Smith told Cinemablend. 

An exasperated Willis told Smith to “snap out of it, you’re a grown-up, I’m not David Addison.”