Kevin Smith has revealed that his latest movie Cop Out is a tribute to his late father.
Smith teams up with Bruce Willis and Tracy Morgan for the film, which opened at number two at the U.S. box office this weekend.
The movie follows a veteran NYPD cop whose rare baseball card is stolen. Since it's his only hope to pay for his daughter's upcoming wedding, he recruits his partner to track down the thief, a memorabilia-obsessed gangster.
Speaking to Wenn he said: In my lap came 'A Couple of Dicks,' the original title for Cop Out, which sounds really homoerotic so I didn't really take a look until I (received a) call from Warner Brothers asking me if I read it.
"I thought they wanted me to re-write it or be in it and they wanted me to direct... I read it and thought, 'I could handle this.'
"It's like Lethal Weapon with 60 per cent less action, it's just Clerks (his 1994 comedy) with cops."
"The reason I really connected to the script was my father, who passed away a few years ago, would take me out of school in the afternoon on a Wednesday to see all those kinds of movies like 48 Hours, Die Hard, The Last Boy Scout, Running Scared.
So this would be the movie where my father would think, 'Oh, you do make movies for a living,' because my other stuff he'd be like, 'Does it count as a movie if all you talk about is Star Wars and other movies?'"
Cop Out is released 16th April.
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