Cop Car

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this sounds good.
/film wrote:‘Cop Car’ Is a Wild Blend of Amblin Innocence and Coen Brothers Violence [Sundance 2015]

Cop Car has the brutal elegance of old-school crime fiction. Two young kids find a seemingly abandoned sheriff’s cruiser in a stand of trees. One thing leads to another, and soon they’re off on a joyride through the countryside. But the sheriff wants his car back, and there’s another wild card factor, too, which draws a noose around all their necks.

Few deeds go unpunished in this daylight noir. Yet even through the increasingly grim action an innocence is maintained that sets Cop Car apart from recent companion films such as Cold in July, The Guest, and Blue Ruin. Getting reductive for a moment, Cop Car is like an Amblin film filtered through the twisted vision of the Coen Brothers. It’s a midnight movie blast.

Travis and Harrison (newcomers James Freedson-Jackson and Hays Wellford) are wandering fields on the edge of their Colorado town. They needle and dare one another as they playact whatever concept slips into their heads from moment to moment. The slender Travis has a burgeoning aggressive streak; Harrison, mop-headed in lumpy, stained clothes, is secretive and reluctant.

Their imaginary games take a turn when they find the car; the sheriff’s cruiser beckons as a mysterious artifact. First they throw rocks, then rush to touch it. Soon they’re rolling across fields and dirt roads, ecstatic at their good luck, barely able to see over the dash as they work the pedals. Freedson-Jackson and Wellford have great presence and an instantly familiar chemistry. Their genuine surprise, caution and delight at each new discovery carries us along on their adventure.

Enter the sheriff, who is on strange errands of his own. Kevin Bacon, sporting a gunslinger mustache and viciously pointed crew cut, swaggers into frame as the confident lawman. But it doesn’t take much to transform his bluster into desperation, and the loss of his car represents a serious problem. Watching Bacon play the transformation — primarily without dialogue, as he’s the only performer in many of his scenes — is a delight.

The middle third of Cop Car might benefit from tightening up. After opening with scenes of the kids wandering through the back pastures that spread out from the outskirts of their town, the film rarely steps up the pace to more than a fast trot. At times that works to good effect, as director Jon Watts lets the audience churn, clearly indicating that things for the characters are going to get a lot worse before they get better. But some sequences linger without building much. A scene where Bacon attempts to unlock a car, for example, must be meant to be far more suspenseful than it actually plays out.

Once all the pieces are in place, however, Cop Car becomes relentless, building to a final sequence that is based on such elemental real-world horror I wanted to dive under the seat to escape it. Watts isn’t a sadist; very bad things do happen to these characters, but not in a way designed to punish the audience. He’s building a hard-boiled take on the loss of innocence, and the film’s grim business is surprisingly effective.

/Film score: 8 out of 10

Re: Cop Car

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watched this over the weekend. it was... entertaining? the hesitancy is due to the ending, which really sucks. it's like they didn't have an ending, so they just didn't film one. like someone swiped the last couple pages of shooting script so they just stopped there. almost would have been more satisfying if the opening scene just went on for 90 minutes. but, it was fine. good to see eli thompson from boardwalk empire back on screen.

Re: Cop Car

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Looking forward to seeing this, thanks to the local paper I recently learned the writer/director is from here and this is all shot in Colorado.
"I'm like a dog chasing cars, I wouldn't know what to do if I caught one. . . . I'm not a schemer. I just do things."

Re: Cop Car

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Alexhead wrote:Looking forward to seeing this, thanks to the local paper I recently learned the writer/director is from here and this is all shot in Colorado.
yeah, lots of beautiful scenery for sure.

Re: Recent movie playlist

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Cop Car--nice little Stephen Spielberg kids adventure gone wrong day-in-the-life that admirably captures some of the high country here in Colorado. I thought someone else recently mentioned it but I did a search and found nothing. Anyway, they worked hard to make the kids believable, kind of 80s naive on a lot of things, but the pacing is pretty excellent, the rollouts of little moments that add up to bigger things is nice, and I like how most of the backstory isn't really relevant, it's all about the events of one day. Apparently Marvel liked it enough to hand this director the new Spider Man property, we'll see how that goes.
"I'm like a dog chasing cars, I wouldn't know what to do if I caught one. . . . I'm not a schemer. I just do things."

Re: Cop Car

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I thought the ending was messed up but I kind of liked it.
"I'm like a dog chasing cars, I wouldn't know what to do if I caught one. . . . I'm not a schemer. I just do things."