Copshop

Joe Carnahan's Copshop is well-paced and acted, but I never got into it, because of its script.  It's the kind of script that tries to mix bloody, horrific violence with ironic humor.  Here is a movie where dead bodies litter the screen, people are constantly backstabbing and blowing each other away, but their dialogue is made up out of movie references ("You look like Tom Cruise in that Samurai Movie nobody saw".) and "clever" dialogue where the characters discuss the meaning of deja vu and share sandwich recipes in the middle of life-threatening situations.

Nobody here gets to talk like a human being.  If everybody around you were constant wise asses and continuously referencing pop culture and 70s music like these people do, don't you think it would get old after a while?  And that's a shame, because the film is slickly made, and has a lot of good performances.  Its problems lie solely with the fact that the script credited to Carnahan and Kurt McLeod won't let these people just shut up and kill each other.  No, they have to launch into scripted dialogue about what pirates used to call a cease fire.  By the time a hired killer was insulting a crooked cop about his weight, and then immediately started talking about Chris Hemsworth in the Thor movies, I just wanted it to stop.

The action covers a very busy and blood-soaked night at a small Nevada police station, most of it centered around a rookie cop named Valerie Young (Alexis Louder).  She brings in local lowlife Teddy Murretto (Frank Grillo) after he sucker punches her during a brawl outside of a casino.  Turns out, he wanted to get arrested, as he's on the run from a hitman by the name of Bob Viddick (Gerard Butler) who wants to silence him for good.  Bob cons his way into the prison as well by posing as an alcoholic, and with the two now sharing nearby cells in lock up, things escalate quickly.  There's also a few crooked cops for Valerie to deal with during the night, as well as an assassin (Toby Huss), who is also after Teddy, but will pretty much murder anyone else who gets in his way in the process, and does so, until everyone inside the police station is dead except for our central cast.

Copshop is one of those movies that wants you to know that it is "cool" and ironic almost as soon as the characters start opening their mouths.  Nobody can just shoot or kill anyone, oh no, they have to share witty banter first.  It's also not surprising that Valerie is pretty much the only one in the entire station can handle the situation, as the filmmakers make her out to be not just the only decent person in the entire movie, but also the only one in her department with any scrap of intelligence.  Most of her fellow cops get killed by acting very stupidly in dangerous or suspicious situations, and if they happen to be crooked or dirty, they make dumb mistakes during violent gun battles.  I get that the movie is trying the Tarantino approach, and is mixing classic film genres with classic music and witty dialogue, but Tarantino knows how to make this stuff work.  

Carnahan frequently seems at odds with himself.  He constantly wants to show intense action and gruesome kills, but he also wants us rolling in the aisles with what these characters are saying to each other before they shoot each other in the head.  If you're going to pull off a mix like this, you need to be as precise as a surgeon with a scalpel.  I never got that feeling from this screenplay.  The jokes and dialogue seemed forced and labored.  Like I said, the movie is well made, and everybody up on the screen is selling this material the best they can.  They just can't rise above it.  I wanted to like this more than I did, but the whole artificial feel I got from the entire enterprise prevented me.

I'm sure there is an audience for this, and it will probably have a long life on streaming, which is where a movie like this feels like it belongs.  It's a low budget movie that gets to show off some talented character actors, and I guess it succeeds at that level.  I just didn't enjoy it whenever the actors started reciting the dialogue. 

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