Being unfamiliar with his work, I've been intensely wondering if this guy has the chops to graduate to large-scale cinema. In the span of the 88 minute running time of Cop Car, my feelings on Jon Watts directing Spider-Man: Homecoming went from "Who is this guy?" to "Oh my God, this is almost as much a filmmaking coup for the MCU as it was nabbing Taika Waititi and Ryan Coogler for other upcoming MCU films". We shall see how the first MCU Spider-Man film turns out, but for now, I can confidently say Jon Watts proves himself to be a director to be reckoned with the nail-biter thriller Cop Car.
The first few scenes of Cop Car gradually establish this to be a movie running with basically two parallel plotlines, each with a different overall mood to them. The first of these plotlines involves two adolescent buddies, Travis (James Freedson-Jackson) and Harrison (Hays Wellford), wandering around in a field and stumbling onto an abandoned cop car. While just fooling around with the steering wheel with the parked vehicle, they discover the keys to the automobile and are soon off galavanting across the field and eventually make their way onto the road. The owner of this cop car is corrupt law enforcement officer Sherrif Kretzer (Kevin Bacon), who was disposing of a dead body in that field before his ride was stolen.
It quickly becomes clear what kind of contrast the film is aiming for; the two boys get to live out their dream scenario (they have their very own cop car!) while the malicious sheriff is stuck in the middle of his nightmare scenario (the cop car he uses for illicit activities is missing!). Both plotlines are told through the prism of a realistic gaze that helps to emphasize differing elements in each of the storylines. For the two kids, their interactions and shenanigans feel like they could have been played out as solely wistful "Oh, childhood memories!" fodder in another movie, but here, their antics when engaging with weapons they find in the cop car are both true to how actual kids behave and take on a darker undertone given the larger more gruesome scenario they've become entangled in.
Meanwhile, the more realistic gaze Cop Car places on its characters makes the various ways Kretzer tries to get his cop car back all the more simultaneously dangerous and desperate. Him trying to use his shoelace to fiddle a knob that'll unlock a door to a car he desperately needs takes on all the gravity of an asteroid hurling towards Earth in a disaster movie as the camera lingers directly in extended takes on his struggles to just get this car open. Here is an incredibly corrupt man of influence in society brought down to the longest rung of society by his own folly and it only gets more dire for him from there. Both Kretzer and the two kids are trapped in their own worlds, one fueled by childhood obliviousness, the other fueled by cruelty, and Cop Car looks at the very real consequences of what happens when reality crams into these individually created worlds.
In depicting the various tension-riddled sequences these characters get into, Cop Car truly excels at creating tons of suspense from the most minute of details Editors Megan Brooks and Andrew Hassee know just how long to keep a shot going in order to get the maximum amount of suspense possible while cinematographers Matthew J. Lloyd and Larkin Seiple finds lots of cool visual opportunities offered by the stark and empty landscapes much of the movie takes place in that seem to dwarf the characters, echoing the looks of the works of John Ford and The Coen Brothers No Country For Old Men while etching out its own visual identity. The screenplay by Jon Watts and Christopher Ford offers plenty of opportunities for such sharply realized visuals and it's really impressive how true-to-life the two kid characters in this movie are written, their dialogue (particularly in how assured they are of certain things, like one fellow they encounter surely being "a good guy") feels authentic to how kids actually behave.
The two actors they've played the kids play a big part in why those two lead characters work so well at being believable depictions of children caught up way in over their heads. Kevin Bacon and Shea Wingham are even better as adults who are willing to do anything to survive, their desperation replacing anything resembling humanity in their souls and Bacon's scenes depicting his characters frenzied determination to get his cop car back are particularly effective in communicating this idea. Bacon goes through great pains to emphasize the seedy and despair-ridden nature of this guy and it results in a terrific performance. Director Jon Watts did a great job getting strong turns from these actors (not to mention penning the similarly high-quality script with Christopher Ford) in Cop Car, a riveting thriller about completely separate and individual self-absorbed lives (though one of these lives being far more sympathetic and innocent than the other of course) colliding like two cars smashing into each other on the Freeway.
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