Dwayne Johnson’s Other Guys: is it worth streaming?

Fifteen years after it quietly earned $170 million at the global box office, one of the most underappreciated comedies of its era is getting another moment in the spotlight. The Other Guys, the 2010 action comedy directed by Adam McKay, begins streaming on Hulu on Friday, May 1, 2026, giving a whole new audience the chance to discover what fans of the film have been saying for years: this one deserved more credit than it got.

What the movie is actually about

The film follows two desk-bound NYPD detectives who exist firmly in the shadow of their more celebrated colleagues. Terry Hoitz and Allen Gamble spend their days processing permit violations while the department’s star officers handle the real action. That dynamic flips when a routine case involving a minor infraction spirals into a massive operation connected to a powerful multi-billionaire, pulling the reluctant pair into a world they were never supposed to touch.

The cast assembled around that premise is difficult to argue with. Will Ferrell plays Gamble, the mild-mannered desk detective with an inexplicable past. Mark Wahlberg is Hoitz, his frustrated and frequently baffled partner. Eva Mendes plays Dr. Sheila Gamble, Samuel L. Jackson and Dwayne Johnson appear as the department’s heroic top cops, Michael Keaton plays the precinct captain, and Ray Stevenson rounds out a supporting cast that gives the film considerably more texture than the average studio comedy.

5 things worth knowing before you stream it

1. The idea came from a dinner. McKay conceived the project after watching the natural chemistry between Wahlberg and Ferrell at a meal and decided immediately that he wanted to build a film around it. He later co-wrote the script with Chris Henchy and brought the concept to producer Kevin Messick, who pushed him to develop it into a full feature.
2. Sony Pictures distributed the film in August 2010, and it opened to a warm critical reception, earning a 78% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes and a weighted average score of 64 on Metacritic, with audiences giving it a user score of 6.9 on the same platform.
3. The $100 million production budget was more than justified at the box office, where the film earned approximately $170.4 million worldwide, a total that speaks to its broad appeal across comedy and action audiences.
4. McKay went on to collaborate again with both Ferrell and Wahlberg, producing the Daddy’s Home films in 2015 and 2017, a pairing that owed its existence in part to the goodwill built on this project.
5. The film holds up as a sharp parody of buddy-cop conventions, with McKay using the action genre’s familiar beats to land jokes that would not work in a straight comedy context.

A cast that still commands attention

Part of what makes the film worth revisiting in 2026 is simply how much star power ended up in a movie that never positioned itself as an awards contender. Johnson, who plays one of the precinct’s celebrated top officers, brings the same self-aware energy he has deployed in franchise blockbusters for the better part of a decade.

His scenes with Jackson in the film’s opening act are among the most quoted in the movie’s fanbase. The interplay between Ferrell and Wahlberg, meanwhile, remains the engine that keeps everything moving, built on a genuine comedic tension that McKay recognized the moment he saw it across a dinner table.

The Other Guys starts streaming on Hulu on May 1, 2026.

Story credit: yahoo