by CHRIS BARRY

I have to admit that the tired old mismatched buddy comedy is something I generally approach with considerable trepidation. Even more so when it's mismatched buddy cops. Why? Well, maybe because these movies always suck. Okay, perhaps not always, but for every occasional decent one like, say, Midnight Run, there are two dozen turds like Showtime. It's just one of those things.

The Man manages to lie somewhere in the middle. It's not the worst film of the sort you'll ever see - far from it. But it's hard to pay that much tribute to a film that relies on its recurring fart joke - and an unfunny fart joke at that - to garner all its biggest laughs.

Allow me to sum up the plot for you. Mild-mannered yet talkative dental supplies salesman, Andy (Eugene Levy) goes to Detroit to give a speech at a dental convention. He gets mistaken for an international arms dealer by Joey (Luke Goss), a smooth but vicious criminal. Suddenly, he becomes a necessary evil for Special Agent Derrick Vann (Samuel L. Jackson), a hard-edged, shoot-first-ask-questions-later kind of cop who needs Andy to go on playing the role of arms dealer so he can bust Joey and his entire gunrunning operation - an operation that Derrick is pretty sure is responsible for killing his ex-partner. Plenty of yucks ensue as fish-out-of-water Andy is forced to confront dangerous situation after dangerous situation, driving the impatient and deceptively unfriendly Derrick crazy in the process. And there you have it. Sounds like a pretty original idea, eh? Not to mention hysterical.

But Jackson and Levy are such talented old pros they successfully manage to take a dumb old premise like this and actually make it work for them every once in awhile. The Man is one of those films where you can see the jokes coming from a mile away, but when a good one finally lands you nevertheless find yourself chuckling anyway. Yes, the humour is a little base, in the American Pie sense of the word, but if you're prepared to suffer through a few dumb fart jokes, you'll find there are some genuinely good laughs to be found here as well.

The Man opens Friday, Sept. 9

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