Coffee and Kareem review – a crime against comedy

Before you consider spending 81 minutes in the company of Coffee and Kareem, ask yourself how funny you’re likely to find a 10-year-old talking about molestation in graphic detail. No? A cop conspiracy comedy with few thrills, ham-fisted plotting, and an embarrassing lack of laughs, Michael Dowse’s latest barely scrapes feature length, but somehow still manages to feel like a gargantuan waste of time.

Ed Helms plays the Coffee of the (awful) punny title, an inept Detroit police officer whose attempts to bond with Kareem (Terrence Little Gardenhigh), the son of his girlfriend Vanessa (Taraji P Henson), go disastrously wrong. Kareem tries to have a gangster beat Coffee up to keep him away from Vanessa, discovering a deadly drug-running conspiracy involving the Detroit PD in the process. This leads to Coffee being framed as a violent child-snatcher and sees multiple criminal elements chasing after the pair.

Coffee and Kareem’s plotting brings new definition to the term “thin.” Events happen at random and are totally devoid of believability, whilst the film’s many twists are so glaringly obvious they hardly deserve to be called as such. This could be forgiven if Shane Mack’s script had any decent jokes in it, but it doesn’t. Running gags about homophobia, race relations, and soft-at-heart gangsters go on and on and on, as an agonisingly unfunny dead air comes to fill entire scenes.

Of course, Kareem shows himself as a far more able cop than Coffee, outsmarting baddies and getting involved in shootouts, but this is no kid-friendly wish fulfilment. Coffee and Kareem is far too profane and gory for any child, but far too dull-witted and predictable for an adult. Helms and Gardenhigh do have a decent rapport, and Gardenhigh’s charm does help sell some of the less aggravating writing, but they’re both ill-served by the empty material.

Dowse’s last directorial effort was 2019’s Stuber, which managed some surprisingly competent action scenes hidden behind its mediocre script. He repeats a similar trick here, as the chases and fiery shootouts are well-choreographed and shot with impressive clarity. But this technical skill ends up being in service of nothing. With no investment in the story or characters (attempts at emotional beats are flat and boring), even the flashiest moments prove forgettable.

The fundamental question that Coffee and Kareem fails to answer is “who is this for?” It’s childish but gruesome, action-heavy but uninterested in its own heroes and villains. Everything it tries to do has been done better in other cop comedies (hardly a genre desperate for new entries). Ed Helms, already a purveyor of terrible comedy features, has lowered the bar even further. With Coffee and Kareem, it’s practically touching the floor.

Coffee and Kareem is now steaming on Netflix.