Mark Wahlberg, left, and Will Ferrell star as a pair of mismatched New York City police detectives in the cop-movie spoof The Other Guys. (Columbia Pictures)At last year’s MTV Movie Awards, Will Ferrell and Andy Samberg gave us Cool Guys Don't Look at Explosions, a goofy little music video in which they spoofed the single most ubiquitous and ridiculous of action-movie clichés. Among the fireball-immune stars they poked fun at were Denzel Washington, Will Smith and Mark Wahlberg.

Now, in Ferrell’s new LOL comedy The Other Guys, Wahlberg is in on the joke. The two actors play a pair of second-rate NYPD cops fumbling their way through a spate of action heroics. And inevitably, they try to walk away from an explosion, only to end up flat on their backs, whining about possible soft tissue damage. Well, what did they expect? They aren’t cool guys. They’re the other guys.

Ferrell and director Adam McKay burst into the action genre with both comedy guns blazing. And if there are plenty of missed shots, there are just as many times when their jokes hit us right in the belly.

Wahlberg is Terry Hoitz, a street-wise (but otherwise dumb) detective still trying to live down his last trigger-happy incident. On security detail during a Yankees game, he managed to shoot Derek Jeter. Terry is itching to get out of the office, make some arrests, bust some heads. But he’s paired with Allen Gamble (Ferrell), the precinct’s resident nerd, a forensic accountant who gets his kicks doing paperwork. Anybody’s paperwork.

When Terry finally lures Allen out on a call, he discovers his wussy partner drives a Prius and listens to Little River Band. He also speaks in mushy self-help metaphors. “One of these days,” he admonishes the irascible Terry, “I’m going to climb over that angry wall of yours.”

Allen is a classic Ferrell doofus, from the ’70s-vintage perm and aviator glasses to the send up of touchy-feely talk. In the wonky world that writer-director Adam McKay and co-writer Chris Henchy have created for him, Allen is also an unknowing babe magnet. Hot women hit on him and he remains clueless, while he dismisses his super-sexy wife (Eva Mendes) – who is also a doctor and a gourmet cook – as “the ball and chain.”

But tough Terry has his unpredictable side, too. He refers to himself poetically (if inexplicably) as a peacock and it turns out he’s also one mean ballet dancer. He insists defensively that he learned to pirouette as a kid so he could make fun of the sissies.

Like those past Ferrell and McKay collaborations, Anchorman and Talladega Nights, The Other Guys cheerfully punctures macho pretensions while still being very much a guy flick. It starts out with parodies of wild car chases, slow-motion shootouts and other action-movie tropes, but then ends up indulging our taste for those well-worn thrills. And, also like the other Ferrell-McKay comedies, this one combines hilarious lines and performances with some slack scenes and poorly conceived gags.

But the key to any buddy-cop spoof is chemistry and Ferrell and Wahlberg make for a delightfully weird compound. Dramatic actor Wahlberg has been dabbling in comedy lately and it suits him – he did a great little turn as the hunky, perpetually shirtless security wiz in Date Night. Here, he plays his own riff on the loose-cannon stereotype à la Mel Gibson in the Lethal Weapon movies – that is, when not serving as straight man to Ferrell’s bizarro number cruncher. Like Ferrell’s flute-playing anchorman Ron Burgundy, Allen is a man of unusual talents, which include warbling tragic Irish folk songs in a maudlin baritone.

Allen and Terry finally get their chance to prove their mettle after their precinct’s two resident hotshot cops (Dwayne Johnson and Samuel L. Jackson) take their superhuman heroics one building ledge too far. When Allen attempts to arrest his long-sought quarry – an egregious building-permit violator – he inadvertently leads his partner into the upper echelons of white-collar crime. Their targeted perp turns out to be Sir David Ershson (Steve Coogan), a slick British financier whose Ponzi scheme is on the verge of collapsing as his biggest investor, an Enron-esque corporate behemoth, is starting to ask where its money has gone.

Eva Mendes co-stars as Allen's devoted wife in The Other Guys. (Columbia Pictures) McKay and Henchy attempt a satire of recent Wall Street scandals, but satire has no place in a Will Ferrell comedy. Like Terry, who thinks the Federal Reserve is a prison, the audience is invited to shrug off the plot machinations and just enjoy the high-speed ride. Any outrage is reserved for the curious end credits, which suddenly hit us with a barrage of statistics about the U.S. financial travesty as Rage Against the Machine’s blistering cover of Maggie’s Farm snarls from the soundtrack.

Coogan, master of the weaselly characterization, has fun as a Brit Bernie Madoff. The most refined of scoundrels, he tries to win over Terry and Allen by plying them with extraordinarily delicious mineral water and bribing them with tickets to Broadway shows. (He apologizes for Rock of Ages in advance.)

Michael Keaton is equally amusing as the precinct’s harried, cash-strapped captain, who moonlights as a manager at Bed Bath & Beyond – and occasionally confuses his two jobs. His scenes and Coogan’s are among the smarter and more inspired touches in the script.

Ferrell and McKay burst into the action genre with both comedy guns blazing. And if there are plenty of missed shots (that bad cop/worse cop gag featured in the trailer is one of them), there are just as many times when their jokes hit us right in the belly. When the smoke clears, The Other Guys has just enough clever and silly laughs to make it one of the funnier films in Ferrell’s kooky canon.

The Other Guys opens Aug. 6.

Martin Morrow writes about the arts for CBC News.