BIGGER AND BONNIER
Buddy cop sequel is solid
Under the tagline “Shoot first translate later,” the first Bon Cop Bad Cop was one of the most refreshing movies of 2006; a truly Canadian action/comedy that didn’t pander and was genuinely funny — in both official languages! I think the reason it took 11 years for a sequel was that a Royal Commission had to be convened to find out just how it had managed to work so well.
Fortunately, la deuxième partie manages to recapture much of the energy of the original, thanks in no small part to the reunion of its stars. Colm Feore returns as Martin Ward, an Ontario cop now with the RCMP. And Patrick Huard (also the screenwriter) is David Bouchard, still with the Sûreté du Québec, though deep under cover to investigate organized crime. Even David’s ex-wife and each man’s child are played by the same actors, aging in real time like some sort of Richard Linklater scheme.
The best part of their dynamic in the first film, apart from a fluid bilingualism that allowed each to change languages mid-sentence, sometimes seemingly mid-word, was a dichotomy of temperament. David was the type of cop to throw the rule book out the window, possibly hitting an innocent bystander. Martin would have an extra copy on hand for just such an eventuality.
The sequel kicks off with a Europop soundtrack and a car chase, suggesting that director Alain Desrochers has been studying a successful racing/crime-fighting franchise that in Quebec goes by the name Rapides et Dangereux. Martin manages not to blow David’s cover during a raid by shooting him in the arm, because what cop would do that to another? The two then decide to team up and share information about the mysterious DiPietro (Noam Jenkins) and his Montreal car-theft racket.
The cops are a little older and greyer — Huard is 48, Feore 58 — but not to the point where their policing activities are unbelievable. If the film strains credulity at all, it’s by suggesting that officials in Maine wouldn’t recognize a French-Canadian cop who happens to have strayed across the border. That’s like an Ontarian not knowing the name of that province to the west — um, you know the one I mean.
There’s a strain of filial drama that threatens at times to topple the movie into maudlin territory — what, you want us to care about these comic characters? — but fortunately the screenplay reels in the emotions before they get too heavy. And the subplot of Martin’s estrangement from his son actually provides a clever plot payoff. Bien joué, I say!
There’s even an educational component to Bon Cop 2. As an aspiring French speaker, I learned the nickname for the Quebec police academy; that “ta yeule” is a much faster way to tell someone to pipe down than “fermez ta bouche”; and that the French-Canadian T-word is almost as versatile as the Germanic F-word. Together, they’re expletively unstoppable, as a computer genius played by Mariana Mazza ably demonstrates.
Best of all, unlike Huard’s great 2011 comedy Starbuck, Bad Cop 2 can’t be remade in English for American audiences, because it’s half in English already. (There are lines like “c’est big” and “votre jokes.”) We have here that rare sequel: C’est bon, and it’s not half bad.