Film Review: Bacon struggles to catch up with his ‘Cop Car’
For much of its length, the brisk thriller “Cop Car” walks a very thin line between a pursuit-based nail-biter and a grim comedy. It’s like a cross between “No Country for Old Men” and a Road Runner cartoon.
At the start, we meet two 10-year-old boys (James Freedson Jackson, Hays Wellford), as they run away from home. Like most such attempts at that age, what they’re doing is sheer folly.
As they walk across fields, they pass the time by competing over who can come up with the dirtiest word. They check their food supply for the trip; they conclude that one Slim Jim should be enough if they ration themselves. So far their folly seems harmless.
And then they spy the vehicle of the title — a cop car, abandoned in the middle of nowhere, its keys ready, and a bunch of guns in the back. They steal the car, swerving all over the road as they drive. At times they simply speed right down the left lane, as though they don’t even know that you drive on the right — which makes them seem a little dumber than we thought.
That ups their jeopardy. Running away is one thing; grand theft auto quite another. And they’re smart enough to know how to drive (really badly) but without the judgment to know not to.
We’re a good 15 minutes in before we get an explanation for why the car was there in the first place. We see Sheriff Kretzer (Kevin Bacon, flexing his well known “bad guy” skills) leave it there while he surreptitiously buries a dead body. Keeping this information back from us so long means director/co-writer Jon Watts has to leap back in time 20 or 30 minutes to fill us in. Unfortunately he doesn’t give a hint that he’s leaping back, and the result is initially confusing.
When Kretzer gets back, he naturally freaks out. Besides there’s still something in the trunk that could put him in jail. It’s at this point that the movie gets funny, even as the situation gets scarier.
Kretzer has one misfortune after another. He breaks into a car, but he has to try using a shoelace as a makeshift Slim Jim (not the edible kind). He runs into all sorts of close calls on the road. Both his frustration and his determination suggest Wile E. Coyote.
Since the whole story is basically Kretzer’s attempt to locate the kids, he can’t be allowed to meet them until the climax. This demands crosscutting for most of the movie’s length, and our sympathies are deliberately thrown out of whack. It’s easy to start rooting for the villain in the scenes where we’re seeing things from his point of view and he can’t catch a break.
Watts keeps things lean by making the characters as generic as possible. We never know much of anything about why the kids have left; Kretzer is your basic Bad Cop; all we learn about him is how he got into the current predicament, and even that not until near the end.
It’s efficient, but it comes with a price: by stripping away all irrelevant details and back story, Watts makes it hard for us to care deeply about the kids or have some emotional bond with them.
“Cop Car” is playing at Playhouse 7 in Pasadena.
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ANDY KLEIN is the film critic for Marquee. He can also be heard on “FilmWeek” on KPCC-FM (89.3).