A joyride takes a wrong turn in Cop Car
When the 10-year-old heroes of Cop Car first see the cruiser in question, it’s parked unattended in a field, ready to be plucked like a daisy. Travis (James Freedson-Jackson) and Harrison (Hays Wellford) make a fine pair of pipsqueaks, and they’re on a great journey when they find the car, having run away from home that same day. They have no real reason or complaint or plans, just a single piece of beef jerky and a boy’s own sense of adventure.
More important, they also have Jon Watts, a technically polished director (this is his second feature, after Clown), who seems to have made a close study of arthouse exploitation flicks like Blood Simple. From the moment that Cop Car opens on Travis and Harrison, walking and talking in a parched field, in long shot, dwarfed by distant mountains and the wide-open sky above, it’s clear that Watts knows how to shoot. He also knows when to cut, and a few edits later you’re within breathing distance of the children; the spatial configuration has rapidly flipped to a more intimate and conventional one, and now Travis and Harrison loom large in the frame.
They continue to do so in spite of the appearance of the custodian of the car or, really, just Kevin Bacon. He plays Sheriff Kretzer, one of those flamboyantly bad men who are easy to love in movies if not life, and who really, really wants his car back. With his shades and a moustache that rides his lip like a fuzzy frown, Kretzer looks as if he’s stepped out of a classic grindhouse flick. Look closer, though, and there’s no mistaking that both he and the movie are far slicker than any genuine sticky-carpet fare. Cop Car may be a streamlined genre exercise, but it’s one that, in its self-consciousness and breezy, instrumental violence, overtly and ambitiously announces itself as the latest spawn of neo-exploitation artists like Quentin Tarantino and the early-era Joel and Ethan Coen.
That’s the idea, at any rate, although there’s not enough personal style or soul in Cop Car to make it Tarantinoesque or even Coenesque, and not enough wit or joie de vivre either. It’s an extremely well-lubricated entertainment machine filled with attractive images and wall-to-wall appealing performances, including from Camryn Manheim and Shea Whigham, an invaluable player. (The directors of photography, Matthew J. Lloyd and Larkin Seiple, do a lot of heavy lifting, as do the editors, Megan Brooks and Andrew Hasse.) Part of what makes Cop Car such easy viewing is that it doesn’t ask much of you narratively or ethically. Watts, who wrote the screenplay with Christopher Ford, just oils it up, turns the key and goes zoom-zoom, flexing his skills as the audience eats his dust.