If you look at the reviews for Martin Lawrence & Luke Wilson's Blue Streak, you will see a lot of bad critic reviews and pretty good but not amazing audience reviews. It appears to be just a regular action/comedy. I mean Martin's gotten some big success with the Bad Boys franchise, but most of what he does doesn't exactly have broad appeal. From afar, this movie again seems like just some generic TNT at 3 pm movie.
The thing though is that it takes Saves the Cat to the absolute extreme. Basically, the idea is you have your hero literally save a cat so that the audience likes them more for doing a heroic/cool act. This movie's formula is a constant string of Saves the Cat scenes but they use Martin's comedy to carry each scene. Like it has him in a heist where he's an expert safe cracker, then to a bizarre pizza man alias, to pretending to be a cop and pick pocketing Luke Wilson, to talking his way onto the police force, to finding a bunch of stolen hubcaps, to disarming Dave Chapelle as as a criminal in back-to-back-to-back scenes. He's just an incredibly charismatic guy pulling off things in incredible ways. You take the basic idea of a scene and then just let Martin freelance. The "stolen hubcaps" scene is also a Chekhov's gun!
I think that this is the blueprint for approaching an action movie where you have a comic star. Just set them up to "Save the Cat" or do something bad ass over and over and over again and just let them cook. Like shouldn't Martin be getting a salary or something? The answer is who cares! It takes away from the pacing. They kind of address it...but not really. I'd rather have him solving crimes every three minutes in imaginative ways instead of giving that kind of backstory.
Also having an almost A list actor in Luke Wilson act as straight man is no small part to the success of this movie. I have to imagine he loved filming it too. Anyway I recommend the living shit out of this movie, it's awesome
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