Chris Knipp
08-21-2015, 12:12 PM
Jon Watts: Cop Car (2015)
http://www.chrisknipp.com/links/copcar.jpg
Little runaways and a bad guy and a heck of a joy ride
Cop Car is silly, nasty fun. A B-movie with a novel premise, it's an real oddity, a blend of a boys' own wild adventure story with the excruciating pleasure of the bloody, slow finale of Coen brothers' Blood Simple. It begins frilly and light, with two delightfully naive ten-year-old boys who've run away, and turns dark and bloody, deadly dangerous. Its most memorable images are these: a scrawny villainous sheriff running at Keystone Cops speed across a wide-open field, carrying a dark bag; and the two ten-year-olds piloting his stolen vehicle at 90 miles an hour along an empty highway.
Having run away and set off across the rural Colorado countryside, the boys, Harrison (Hays Wellford) and Travis (James Freedson-Jackson), have come across the high-powered sheriff's patrol car with the keys on the seat, a raft of guns, and (they discover after a suitable delay) a man tied up in the trunk (Shea Whigham), while the cop is busy dropping a corpse in a cistern and covering it with quicklime. The cop (Kevin Bacon) is a very bad and cleverly dissembling man whose two victims aren't nice. But the point is not that (though it might have been filled in more fully). It is the intersection of boyish naughtiness and very dangerous and evil buffoonery. Maybe that intersection isn't quite enough, and the balance of contrasting elements is tricky to maintain. But in its back and forth the story is nicely told. Key to it is a bespectacled rural lady (Camryn Manheim), who discovers the boy's astonishing theft when they roar past her on the highway.
The best of the movie is its patience with the boys' funny combination of boldness and timidity, and the way they tantalizingly flirt with far greater danger than they know, both with the guns that could go off in their faces and the fast car that becomes their very risky toy. It all starts with a slow series of cuss words that one boy says, and the other, after a long beat, repeats. He stops at the "F" word, refusing to say it. Later when things get dicey, he will. The two young actors don't have that slick Hollywood actor-y quality. They're fresh and authentic and take us straight back to boyhood better than Linklater's tour-de-force. Maybe the filmmakers aren't as arch in their portrayal of rural simplicity and venality as the Coens or as talented at screwing up the suspense as they, but this business of the boys' naive world is almost as well realized as Mark Twain's.
The cop, despite Kevn Bacon's practiced skill, isn't quite as interesting as the boys. But the basic gimmick, the crooked county sheriff who has to get his car back and the runaway kids on a wild ride, is sustained throughout the movie's compact 86 minutes with unflagging energy and wit. Cop Car is thoroughly diverting. It's smallness is no a flaw but a result of its economy and should not be held against it. Brevity is the soul of wit.
Cop Car was written by Watts with his previous collaborator on two TV movies and his previous feature, Clown, Christopher D. Ford.
Cop Car, 86 mins., debuted at Sundance Jan. 2015, showing in over a half dozen other festivals including San Francisco, Seattle and Edinburgh, US release from 7 Aug. 2015.
http://www.chrisknipp.com/links/copcar.jpg
Little runaways and a bad guy and a heck of a joy ride
Cop Car is silly, nasty fun. A B-movie with a novel premise, it's an real oddity, a blend of a boys' own wild adventure story with the excruciating pleasure of the bloody, slow finale of Coen brothers' Blood Simple. It begins frilly and light, with two delightfully naive ten-year-old boys who've run away, and turns dark and bloody, deadly dangerous. Its most memorable images are these: a scrawny villainous sheriff running at Keystone Cops speed across a wide-open field, carrying a dark bag; and the two ten-year-olds piloting his stolen vehicle at 90 miles an hour along an empty highway.
Having run away and set off across the rural Colorado countryside, the boys, Harrison (Hays Wellford) and Travis (James Freedson-Jackson), have come across the high-powered sheriff's patrol car with the keys on the seat, a raft of guns, and (they discover after a suitable delay) a man tied up in the trunk (Shea Whigham), while the cop is busy dropping a corpse in a cistern and covering it with quicklime. The cop (Kevin Bacon) is a very bad and cleverly dissembling man whose two victims aren't nice. But the point is not that (though it might have been filled in more fully). It is the intersection of boyish naughtiness and very dangerous and evil buffoonery. Maybe that intersection isn't quite enough, and the balance of contrasting elements is tricky to maintain. But in its back and forth the story is nicely told. Key to it is a bespectacled rural lady (Camryn Manheim), who discovers the boy's astonishing theft when they roar past her on the highway.
The best of the movie is its patience with the boys' funny combination of boldness and timidity, and the way they tantalizingly flirt with far greater danger than they know, both with the guns that could go off in their faces and the fast car that becomes their very risky toy. It all starts with a slow series of cuss words that one boy says, and the other, after a long beat, repeats. He stops at the "F" word, refusing to say it. Later when things get dicey, he will. The two young actors don't have that slick Hollywood actor-y quality. They're fresh and authentic and take us straight back to boyhood better than Linklater's tour-de-force. Maybe the filmmakers aren't as arch in their portrayal of rural simplicity and venality as the Coens or as talented at screwing up the suspense as they, but this business of the boys' naive world is almost as well realized as Mark Twain's.
The cop, despite Kevn Bacon's practiced skill, isn't quite as interesting as the boys. But the basic gimmick, the crooked county sheriff who has to get his car back and the runaway kids on a wild ride, is sustained throughout the movie's compact 86 minutes with unflagging energy and wit. Cop Car is thoroughly diverting. It's smallness is no a flaw but a result of its economy and should not be held against it. Brevity is the soul of wit.
Cop Car was written by Watts with his previous collaborator on two TV movies and his previous feature, Clown, Christopher D. Ford.
Cop Car, 86 mins., debuted at Sundance Jan. 2015, showing in over a half dozen other festivals including San Francisco, Seattle and Edinburgh, US release from 7 Aug. 2015.