Mark Reviews Movies: COPSHOP

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Review by Mark Dujsik | September 16, 2021

In Copshop, a clockwork plot is bolstered by simple but strongly defined characters. Sometimes, that's all a story needs.

Co-writer/director Joe Carnahan's film possesses an almost theatrical quality, in its limited and restricted setting and with its bouts of verbal sparring between people with clear but conflicting motives. Despite and/or because of that property, the thing moves with precision, clarity, and a constant sense of surprise, which might only be matched or topped by the film's unrelenting nastiness about the worst of people and pessimism about the relative best of them.

The premise is almost like the setup to a joke. Have you heard the one about the guy who's on the run from some criminals who mean to kill him—and who, to find some safety and security, sucker-punches a cop to get locked up in jail?

That's the position of Teddy Murretto (Frank Grillo), whom we first meet driving along a desert highway in a dusty car, peppered with bullet holes and smoking toward becoming overheated. When the car stops, Teddy makes a run for it, carrying only a blue case that looks a bit like a purse, toward somewhere—anywhere—that's not the place whence he came.

The cop he eventually hits is Valerie Young (Alexis Louder, in what should be a star-making turn), an officer with the local police department in the city of Gun Creek, Nevada. Called in to stop a brawl outside a casino with her commanding officer Mitchell (Chad L. Coleman), Young takes a hard strike from a running and, quickly, apologetic Teddy, who desperately yells for someone—anyone—to arrest him, already. Young does—but not before giving him a couple jolts from a taser to return the favor.

A mysterious man, whom we later learn to be Bob Viddick (Gerard Butler), watches the scene from his passing car, which he later drives directly into Teddy's broken down vehicle and toward a pair of state troopers. Visibly and odorously drunk, Bob ends up heading to the same police station where Teddy is currently locked up.

Carnahan and Kurt McLeod's screenplay revels in a brand of tough, no-nonsense dialogue as the mechanics of getting Teddy, Bob, Young, and a series of other characters—some of whom seem important, only to be dispatched with little to no warning, and others who arrive as if from the stinking pits of immorality—in close quarters with each other. The big gears of the plot are unmistakable and broad.

It is clever, though, how those obvious moves disguise or distract from the multiple, smaller gears moving in the backdrop, whether it be a glance toward the station's armory or a pistol intended as a gift or a bunch of bullets falling to the floor in a game of quick-draw. The story here seemingly renders the principle of Chekhov's gun irrelevant, since so many pistols established in the first act become necessary for the chaotic third. Regardless, there's something almost admirable in just how many guns we forget about, only for the screenwriters to pull them back into play, in the process.

Anyway, Teddy has a bounty on his head. The reason is almost irrelevant, although it has to do with the murder of a state government official and that blue case—the contents of which are never revealed, because none of that is the point. That's when we get the punch line to the premise: One of the professional killers looking to put an end to Teddy is Bob. He has arranged his arrest in order to get close to—but, locked up in separate cells, still so far from—Teddy.

The rest of this is relatively simple. The coldly professional Bob wants to kill Teddy. The always-on-the-run Teddy wants to escape and find out if his ex-wife and son are safe. The by-the-books Young wants answers to close this mess of a case in her station's holding cells. Then, Anthony Lamb (Toby Huss)—the payoff to Bob's assertion that he isn't a psychopath and that Teddy will know one when he sees one—arrives to wreak bloody, senseless violence upon the entire police station.

There's a cruel logic to each and every step of this plot. That's partly because Carnahan and McLeod make the effort to play with setups and payoffs. It's mostly, though, because they've done the work of creating such straightforward and diversely driven characters, performed with blunt clarity by the cast. A battle of wits kind of unfolds in and between the cells, as Teddy and Bob each try to convince the skeptical Young that she should trust him and not the other guy.

While Anthony's continuing slaughter and attempts to find a way to all three of the others unfolds, a more practical and cynical mystery begins. Are these characters worthy of trust and capable of change, or as Bob claims, are people always exactly the sort they are, regardless of the circumstances?

The big payoff to the plot and the character work, obviously, is an extended series of action sequences, which are both well-crafted (in terms of staging and re-introducing things that stopped seeming important) and a bit deflating. Given the personalities on display and the stakes at play here, there's no other way that Copshop could resolve these assorted conflicts. The belief that Carnahan might have been capable of giving us more and something different, though, might be the best evidence of how well the film works until and despite that inevitable carnage.

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