National Security Buy National Security from my web shop

(- 2003 -)

Original Title National Security Director Dennis Dugan Genre Action, Thriller, Comedy Released 2003-01-15 MPAA Rating Rated PG-13 for violence, language and some sensuality. Rated 4.3

Plot Summary

Earl and Hank have only one thing in common: they're both L.A.P.D. rejects. One just got kicked out, the other can't even get in. After confronting each other on opposite sides of the law during a traffic stop that escalates out of control, these two luckless individuals end up partnered as lowly security guards. Despite being damned to the lowest rung of the law enforcement ladder, Earl and Hank uncover a sophisticated smuggling operation led by Nash and his band of thugs. When Earl and Hank get their hands on some hot property, they go on the run from, first the bad guys, then the L.A.P.D.--led by Lt. Washington and Detective McDuff. What these two unlikely partners do to law enforcement is a crime, but they just might save the day. That is, if they don't kill each other first.

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Actors / Character

Martin Lawrence as Earl Montgomery , Steve Zahn as Hank Rafferty , Colm Feore as Detective Frank McDuff , Bill Duke as Lieutenant Washington , Eric Roberts as Nash , Timothy Busfield as Charlie Reed , Robinne Lee as Denise , Matt McCoy as Robert Barton , Brett Cullen as Heston , Cleo King as Woman in Car , Gerry Del Sol as Booking Clerk , Ken Lerner as Hank's Lawyer , Mari Morrow as Lola , Stephen Tobolowsky as Billy Narthax , Joe Flaherty as Owen Fergus

IMDB User Comments

Martin Lawrence's latest awful movie goes from just being a bad comedy to being downright offensive, and in the worst way possible. The parody made from the Rodney King beating was absolutely unacceptable in this movie, and I'm sure I'm going to get a lot of e-mails from people who say that I'm taking this too seriously, but there are at least as many people who didn't take that event seriously enough. The Rodney King beating was not a small racist trial that took place in Los Angeles just because a bunch of white police officers lost their tempers with a black man, it was a signpost of the state of the entirety of American society, and the fact that Lawrence is able to star in a movie that makes a joke out of it is nothing more than a new signpost that lets us know that we have been traveling in exactly the wrong direction since 1992. Lawrence plays Earl Montgomery, a security guard desperately trying to get into the real police department (although his tactics during a criminal pursuit exercise show that he's more interested in getting into a bad movie than in earning a badge), only to get booted out for good reason after a particular training session, which exists because the screenplay for this movie finds it necessary, so it's back to the lowly security job for him (and by the way, maybe someone could let me know what it is exactly about security jobs that makes them so lowly in the movies). Steve Zahn, whose talent as a comedic actor far surpasses Lawrence's, is badly miscast in a role as the serious character who's trying to keep Earl in line. His partner is killed early in the film, in a scene where Zahn showed that he can act a serious role (although certainly not alongside a clown like Lawrence), and he sets out determined to revenge his partner's death. During a routine patrol, he spots Earl leaning into his car trying to reach his keys in the ignition (rather than reaching for the door lock as he would have done had he had two brain cells operating simultaneously at the time). Earl makes a big fuss about a simple question asked by a police officer, simply because of race issues, and the scene escalates to the point where a bystander videotapes what appears to have been a severe beating. Instead of making even a good-natured joke about police brutality (which would have been a daunting task in itself), National Security instead suggests how easy it is for a video-tape like that to be misused, which leads to the suggestion that the Rodney King tape was similarly misleading. Hank (Zahn) ends up getting convicted of police brutality and sails effortlessly through a six-month sentence in prison, which is simplified so massively that the entirety of it takes up maybe two minutes of screen time. Once Hank is released from prison, he has obviously been kicked off the force, but takes a night security job and is still determined to discover who killed his partner. Using a police scanner, he intercepts a call from dispatch similar to the call that ultimately resulted in his partner's death, and he immediately gets to the scene to find outwardly obvious signs that is has been/is being broken into, and he goes inside giddy with anticipation that he's about to exact his revenge. Earl, meanwhile, the real security guard at the place, is upstairs undressing his girlfriend and playing a kinky game that results in her in her underwear chained to a pipe near the ceiling. This is not an entirely unappreciated scene, with Earl's half-naked girlfriend, except that it's so obvious that she's placed there to temporarily distract us from the fact that these hardened cop-killing criminals are robbing a BEVERAGE factory and that this soda factory is guarded at night by a night security guard who happens to be heavily armed, to say the least. I love how after Hank gets out of prison, he takes a two-day security guard training class that culminates in the revelation of a high-tech pouch on the belt that carries a lot of quarters to use to call the police in the event of a REAL emergency, yet the night watch guy at a soda factory is armed with a sub-machine gun. Luckily, it is later revealed that, rather than stealing crates of Cactus Cooler from the scene of the lengthy Coca-Cola commercial that is this robbery and shootout scene, the bad guys are stealing tremendously valuable kegs that are made out of the strongest metal on earth, which is described as `invulnerable to any force known to mankind' (except, of course, the one that was used to shape them into beer kegs). There is a rather amusing scene (amusing because of it's boundless stupidity, of course) where Hank and Earl (yet another version of the reluctant odd couple) manage to get into the van carrying the stolen kegs while it is being transported in the back of a semi trailer. When Earl is trying to hotwire the van (in one of the few scenes that doesn't cement every stereotype there is about black people), he doesn't really know what he's doing and turns on first the windshield wipers and then the alarm, alerting the guys in the truck's cab that they're there. Now, instead of pulling over and finding out what's going on, they climb out of the cab in heavy traffic and start firing their machine guns into the truck's trailer, and then the driver swerves to the side, swinging the trailer sideways and blocking all three lanes of traffic and leaving the audience wondering how many seconds it will be before someone calls the police and reports what's happening. Earl finally gets the van started and they drive it out the back of the truck and straight off the side of the bridge, which would have been one of the movie's only good scenes except that is ended in a drop off the bridge and a landing on a garbage barge that would have liquefied every bone in both of their bodies, yet they stumble out of the van as if they just drove off a curb. Reality is suspended in every way in this movie, which may be why it feels that it can take such a tremendously serious issue in real life and make a complete mockery of it. Real amusing, but like Life, another Lawrence comedy (although significantly better than this one), National Security does not know that it's material deserves to be taken more seriously than it is. Anyone who has seen The Original Kings of Comedy knows that the majority of black comedians have little to talk about except amusing differences between black people and white people, and this tired issue is beaten to death in National Security. Just about every time Lawrence is onscreen he is making some idiot joke about how the black man is persecuted by the white man, making me so sick and tired of it that I wish the movie would just end if that's all there is left to hear. I can just imagine the writers for this ridiculous mess when they came up with the idea for the film. `Okay, let's see, let's take the Rodney King beating, add in Martin Lawrence, tons and tons and tons and tons and tons and tons and tons of race jokes, and a bumble-bee! HAW HAW HAW!' Well, at least the writers were amused. The rest of us are left to fend for ourselves.

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