Cop Car

Director: Jon Watts
Screenplay: Jon Watts & Christopher D. Ford
Stars: Kevin Bacon (Sheriff Kretzer), James Freedson-Jackson (Travis), Hays Wellford (Harrison), Camryn Manheim (Bev), Shea Whigham (Man), Sean Hartley (Motorcycle Cop), Kyra Sedgwick (Dispatch), Loi Nguyen (Waiter), Sit Lenh (Hostess), Chuck Kull (Officer #1), Thomas Coates (Officer #2)
MPAA Rating: R
Year of Release: 2015
Country: U.S.
Cop Car
Cop CarJon Watts’s Cop Car isn’t a particularly ambitious film, but what it does, it does quite well. A taut, lean, unapologetically gritty and downbeat tale about two runaway adolescent boys who happen upon a seemingly abandoned police car, it has the literary feel of a hard-boiled short story with its limited setting over the course of a single day and cast of characters you can count on one hand. It is set against the warm sun and pastoral beauty of the rural Midwest, but it depicts a world in which there is no real innocence, only varying levels of corruption.

The focus of the story is fairly evenly split between two protagonists. On the one hand, we have the two adolescent boys, Travis (James Freedson-Jackson) and Harrison (Hays Wellford), the latter of whom appears to be the more conventionally innocent of the two (the film opens with them walking through a field while Travis ticks off cuss words that Harrison then repeats, until they get to the dreaded F-bomb, which he can’t bring himself to utter). We learn fairly quickly that they are running away from home, although the exact reasons for this are left vague. There are intimations of fractured families and disaffection, but the real point is that they are alone in a mean world, which is clearly embodied in the film’s other protagonist, Sherriff Kretzer (Kevin Bacon), the owner of the titular car. When Travis and Harrison find the car sitting among some trees in the middle of nowhere, their immediate inclination is to investigate it. Their wary curiosity becomes more and more brazen once they find the door unlocked and then discover the keys, which allows them to partake in the particularly wild adolescent fantasy of taking a fully loaded cop car on a joyride (neither one, of course, knows how to drive, but they figure it out).

Meanwhile, we discover that the sheriff is not with his car because he’s busy dumping a body in an abandoned well a few hundred yards away. Thus, he is not aware that anything is happening until he comes back and finds the car missing, at which point he must simultaneously figure out what has happened to it and disguise the fact that the car has been stolen, lest his colleagues on the force figure out that he is up to no good. Bacon, who sports a crew cut and a Wyatt Earp mustache, is in his shifty-eyed, gruff mode here, playing Kretzer as a villain through and through, albeit not one with whom we cannot sympathize. In the best Hitchcockian manner, Watts (who co-wrote the script with Christopher D. Ford) amplifies the suspense by making us simultaneously concerned that Kretzer will discover the boys and that he won’t. There is something almost comically perverse about this murderous police officer discovering that his car has been stolen and running through the fields in a T-shirt, hoping against hope to find it before anyone realizes what he’s up to.

Things get even more complicated with the introduction of a few other characters, including Camryn Manheim as a woman who sees the kids joyriding down the highway, and Shea Whigham as one of the sheriff’s bloodied would-be victims who concocts a scheme for revenge that has Travis and Harrison caught in the middle. A scene in which Kretzer is stopped by a motorcycle cop (Sean Hartley) right after he has stolen a car is a prickly good moment of tortured identification that almost makes us forget that we should be rooting for the two kids, who have clearly wandered into a world they had no idea existed. There is a huge gap between the thrill of saying bad words out loud and murderous criminality, and at its best Cop Car nails the real ugliness of the world’s corruption, even going so far as to leave us with the unsentimental possibility that both innocence and innocents often meet terrible fates.

Copyright ©2015 James Kendrick

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Overall Rating: (3)




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