So, circling back to the film, "The Other Guys" is a screw-ball comedy that depicts two mildly unstable police detectives - Will Ferrell and Mark Wahlberg - who intentionally and unintentionally facilitate non-stop, goofiness and destruction. These common-man coppers begin the film within the shadows of clichéd super cops Samuel L. Jackson and The Rock. As Will and Mark grapple with each other's significant personality quirks, they eventually crawl out of the shadows and into the limelight - competently solving a billion dollar Ponzi scheme and attaining the requisite storybook bro-mance. Along the way, the two stooges each exhibit a core psychological issue that comes attached with a very specific and consistent constellation of symptoms.

Will Ferrell's Flashes of Autism

Granted, Will Ferrell is playing some combination of himself, a comedian and a cop character, which engenders an almost incoherent mish-mash of personality features. But, as the film progresses a coherent trait of mental illness crystallizes from within his cinematic personality, and it relates to a severe sense of social stupidity. Essentially, Will cannot read social signals to save his life. The desk-pop skit (when colleagues prank Will into firing his loaded gun inside the police station - an obvious no-no) proves that he can't tell when others are being disingenuous. Confusing the good-cop, bad-cop routine with a bad-cop, worse-cop rendition proves that he cannot follow culturally-endorsed schemas, otherwise known as things that socially aware individuals implicitly understand.

When he engages in a verbal duel with the increasing frustrated Mark, instead of recognizing his partner's escalating sense of indignation and shutting up to avoid further conflict, Will unintentionally taunts Mark and incites a scalding-coffee-on-the-shirt incident. The two points of social awkwardness here are his compulsive need to comment on ongoing events - an utterly unguarded filter - and his failure to accurately gage Mark's mood state and mind set (i.e. the audience saw the coffee thing coming a mile away).

Will's social blindness is made-up up of difficulties reading other people, engaging in clear non-verbal communication, understanding implicit and common knowledge, and following social rules and schemas. His inability to act cool is only intensified by his desire to fit in. Such characteristics mirror the social impairments of high-functioning Autism. This is not a seamless fit as Will does not exhibit the language problems or strange, repetitious behaviors associated with the more extreme end of the autistic spectrum, but this may be counteracted by autism-related strengths in attention and memorization that Will possesses as his nose for the paper trail proves quite hound-like.

Mark Wahlberg and Histrionic Undertones

If Will's behavior takes home the social stupidity crown then Mark takes the cake for emotional idiocy. His problem boils down to difficulties understanding, regulating and reducing emotions.

He accidently shoots Derek Jeter in the leg (perhaps the worst crime a NY City cop can commit) and manages the subsequent shame by never saying a word at weekly counseling meetings and boiling below the surface. A prime example is the fact that at least 80% of his communication involves mannerisms of restlessness and angery (i.e. yelling and pacing). Such stoicism and suppression is the hallmark of poor emotion management. Consequently a lot of temper-tantrum like behavior runs through Mark as when he pours coffee on Will because he can't think of a clever retort. The impulsivity and anger surfaces most vividly when Mark starts to go into withdrawal from his action fix. Having been assigned to a desk after the Jeter shooting, Mark itches to get back on the beat, and sniff out the big case. To this point, Mark becomes increasingly motivated to push his reluctant partner into action. At the pennicle of this pursuit Mark kidnaps Will in order to beat the other cops to a bloody crime scene. And throughout there is an escalating shrillness and desperation to his mantra, "I'm a peacock, you have to let me fly." Mark's emotional intensity and instability continue to fire in loose-cannon fashion (symbolized quite nicely by the actual Jeter shooting) as he loses his cool in front of his ex-girlfriend, and hits on Will's hot wife with reckless abandon.

Mark's emotional idiocy is made-up of sensitivity to perceived slights, anger management problems, a marked inability to calm down or refrain from rash action. This pattern of overblown emotionality also includes a flair for the dramatic and the flirtatious, all of which orbit around an all-consuming need for approval. Although such emotional problems can plague people in myriad ways the Mark-persona seems to adequately reflect Histrionic Personality Disorder.

But the real-world autistic and histrionic tendencies that underlie the duo's odd and humorous presentation are elements of mental illness that alienate and disconnect the audience from the characters. In addition to laughing at the characters, a successful film will help the audience relate to and, therefore, laugh with the characters. The film stumbles somewhat in this regard but does inject the characters with a few psychologically healthy and resilient qualities. For instance, Will is bestowed with sporadic self-insight. He knows he screwed up the good-cop, bad-cop routine and he feels sufficiently embarrassed. Mark possesses admirable passion and dedication to his professional identity as a detective. Perhaps the characteristic that best facilitates mental health and, in turn, their relatedness to the audience is a quality that both Will and Mark share - a clear and positive values system. Unlike the other self-centered, incompetent publicity hounds in the police department, Mark and Will want a better, more just world, in which bad guys go to jail and hard work rules the day.

Overall assessment: In "The Other Guys," Mark and Will have the heart of Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman in "All The President's Men," and the social and emotional acumen of Jim Carrey and Jeff Daniels in "Dumb and Dumber."

The Result: An enjoyable film with a firm backbone of humor and a palatable plot. The humor suffers from a lack of envelope pushing and the plot suffers from the confines of a predictable and lazy script, but Mark and Will bring strong energy and clear chemistry to their partnership.