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Dwayne Johnson commands the whole screen in "Central Intelligence" with his blend of power and naïveté, purpose and bewilderment. Yet it isn't enough... It isn't just the massacre in Orlando last weekend that puts the violence of "Central Intelligence" in the spotlight. The script is constructed so as to put shoot-outs into the foreground and push the director, Rawson Marshall Thurber (who co-wrote the script with Ike Barinholtz and David Stassen), into strategic terrain that isn't his strength.

A smart director has to figure out how to play with the elements, to bring spontaneity and surprise without completely upending expectations. Central Intelligence won't blow you out of the theater, but you might be surprised at how well it works — how genuinely funny it is — given the familiarity of this concept.

Like all good comedies, it's dotted with things you think you probably shouldn't laugh at, which only makes them funnier. Director Rawson Marshall Thurber, working from a script he co-wrote with Ike Barinholtz and David Stassen, keeps the story moving briskly, so its flaws pass by in a blur.

There's a kitchen fight in "Central Intelligence" pitting a man with a butcher knife against a man with a banana. The man with the banana wins. I love scenes like this, where the movie seems to be saying, "This is the kind of movie I am—the kind where you can kill a man with a banana. Enjoy." And you do.

Thurber (We're The Millers, Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story), whose style seems to consist of saying "more" and "cut," makes the least of a decent premise and appealing cast in Central Intelligence, a shambolic high-concept farce that doubles as a cautionary tale of where studio comedies go wrong. In spots [it's] as indifferent and self-indulgent as any latter-day Adam Sandler production.

An odd-couple caper of staggering dopeyness that makes you long for the snap and sizzle of the buddy movies of the 1980s, "Central Intelligence" is a clean-out-the-fridge soup of celebrity cameos and C.I.A. confusion. But not even actors with the heft of Amy Ryan, Jason Bateman and Aaron Paul can fortify a screenplay that's an incoherent muddle of stolen satellite encryption codes and messily staged gun battles. Or maybe I'm just weary of comedies that seem to contain more bullets than jokes.

The bar for studio comedies has sunk so low that when one comes along and doesn't bludgeon you with its ineptness, there's a temptation to lavish praise on it. With that in mind, moviegoers looking for a quick fix of summer escapism could do worse than Central Intelligence, in which an enjoyably matched Kevin Hart and Dwayne Johnson star as odd-couple partners in CIA hijinks. [It's] fast, funny-ish and moderately entertaining.

Nearly 20 years since The Cable Guy, we finally have a protagonist-antagonist to rival Jim Carrey's "Chip" Douglas in indefinable repellence. But whereas that film had the audacity to stick with its unpleasantly dark notions right up through the jaded end, Central Intelligence hides itself in crowd-pleaser drag throughout. If the end result is that it'll probably turn off a lot fewer people than The Cable Guy, odds are considerably lower that it'll ever one day emerge as a cult classic.