Hilarious and menacing.
Cop Car
Grade: A-
Director: Jon Watts (Clown)
Screenplay: Watts, Christopher D. Ford (Robot & Frank)
Cast: Kevin Bacon (X Men: First Class), Shea Whigham (The Wolf of Wall Street)
Rating: R
Runtime: 86 min.
by John DeSando
“Do not steal a cop car!” Sheriff Kretzer (Kevin Bacon)
Cop Car is one of the best comedies of the year. You read me right, even though IMDB lists it as a “thriller.” It’s that , too, but for me watching two ten-year-old boys take off in a seemingly abandoned cop car, with the problems of maneuvering the auto and the bad guys at the same time, has elements of Keystone Cops (humor) and No Country for Old Men or Blood Simple (scary cluelessness). Either way offers amusements for everyone.
Sheriff Kretzer, whose car the boys, Trevor (James Freedson-Jackson) and Harrison (Hays Wellford), have borrowed, is not a virtuous officer, proven by his reason for parking his car in the woods to dump a body while the boys abscond with his car. Although the opening sequence of the boys ambling over fields thinking up swear words is amusing in a Huck-Finn way, the menace escalates as the Sheriff pursues with a determination embodied in his out-of-control moustache and breathless running (he lost his car, after all).
As if a mean Sheriff weren’t enough, another bad man (Shea Whigham) emerges to test the naiveté of the little rascals. Therein lies the ambivalence of the story: The adults are bogeymen from any boy’s nightmare, and the boys are innocently bad experiencing their own mischievousness and their fascination with irresponsibility—such as high-speed driving and loaded guns.
Parents and non-parents alike will squirm as the boys flirt with mortality, yet all will laugh at their squeaking by some murderous adults and situations. The absurdity of the boys’ luck in avoiding death is tempered by the reality of wickedness adult audiences have already experienced in growing up. However, these tikes are just learning, so they lack the protection of experience while their curiosity is even more of a danger:
“What if somebody sees us?” asks one boy. We’ll just tell ‘em we’re cops,” replies the other seriously. No one could take Cop Car seriously except parents who know well little boys’ penchant for dangerous naughtiness. This film is small gem for 2015. Hooray for indie; hooray for mischievous boys; and hooray for Kevin Bacon, who not only helped produce the film but also provides the balancing act between malice and satire.
Nobody does it better this year.
John DeSando, a Los Angeles Press Club first-place winner for National Entertainment Journalism, hosts WCBE’s It’s Movie Time and co-hosts Cinema Classics. Contact him at JDeSando@Columbus.rr.com
