Movie Review - Reno 911: Miami

The trouble with adapting a television show into a movie is that there's often just not enough substance in the original product to justify an hour and a half of straight footage. Reno 911: Miami, the first (and hopefully last) full length movie from the cast of the relatively popular Comedy Central television show Reno 911, does a fairly good job of proving this point.

The film stars the same characters from the TV series, a poorly trained and bumbling group of police officers with various sexual dysfunctions (nearly every scene uses their sexual attraction to each other or lack thereof as a punchline), as they go to Miami and become the patrolling police force after the city's police are incapacitated by a terrorist virus.

Most of the movie follows the same format as the television show; shaky Cops inspired cameras follow the members of the squad around as they fail to solve crimes and deal with the odd locals. For some moments, this actually produces some decent comedy, as when a fat drunk man on one call shows the officers how to tame an alligator (to predictable results). Of course, the gags are simple and nearly identical to scenes from the Comedy Central show; guns misfire, the police become sexually attracted to the people they're supposed to protect, and they bungle their way around Miami. Really, though, that's not such a bad formula; admittedly the gags are predictable and get old after a while, but they're roughly entertaining in a stupid kind of way. There's nothing wrong with stupid comedy.

The problem is when them movie attempts a plot. The main mystery of where the virus came from and why doesn't deserve the attention it gets, at least not without better writing, and subplots feel strained and get boring fast. By about forty five minutes into this movie, all of the steam has run out and it feels like the cast and director knows this. Each scene from this moment on has the air of a bunch of people trying way, way too hard.