The trailer for The Other Guys (Adam McKay, 2010) opens in a fairly conventional manner, mid-action sequence. It's a high-speed chase in which criminals are trading fire with two police detectives: Chris (Dwayne Johnson) is in a typical action pose, hanging onto the roof of a speeding humvee, and P.K. (Samuel L. Jackson) is following close behind in an unmarked police car. They trade quips before Chris leaps from the humvee onto the police car's bonnet and climbs into the passenger seat. The trailer voice over intones, ‘in the toughest city in the world, nobody fights crime like these guys’, and the action culminates in typically hyperbolic fashion with the police car being catapulted into the side of a parked double decker bus. All the traditional generic indicators seem to be present to indicate a straightforward action film: a physically agile and fearless hero, high-speed action and humorous quips. As the trailer develops, however, it becomes clear that this will be a spoof action film. We see that the focus will be on the ‘other guys’, the much less effective police detectives who work in the same office, and the scrapes they get into while aspiring to be like Chris and P.K., a narrative set-up that debunks some of the familiar tropes of the action film. The Other Guys is one of a number of mock or spoof action movies that have emerged towards the end of the 2000s, and which include Tropic Thunder (2008), Black Dynamite (2009), Cop Out (2010) and Red (2010).