Copshop hits some B-movie bullseyes, misses others

 

Director Joe Carnahan once made a tank fly. Through his 2010 movie The A-Team, Carnahan threw all logic or laws of gravity to the wind to make a tank soar through the sky as the creators of cinema intended. For that instance of madness as well as making a modern A-Team movie that's way more fun than it has any right to be, he'll always have my respect. Since that movie, Carnahan has stuck to the low-budget indie scene to deliver gnarly but distinctive fare like The Grey and Stretch. His newest motion picture is the low-budget action movie Copshop, which benefits from Carnahan's experienced hand but could've used more of the over-the-top zest he's brought to other projects.

Teddy Muretto (Frank Grillo) needs a place to hide. He's a con artist so desperate to lay low that he sucker punches a cop, Valerie Young (Alexis Louder), just so he can have a jail cell to reside in. Surely behind bars, none of the people after him will track him down. This seemingly foolproof plan comes crumbling down when the cops pull in master hitman Bob Viddick (Gerard Butler) and place him in the cell across from Muretto. Now, these two men are trapped in the same holding area, an already grisly proposition enhanced in nastiness by the arrival of psychopathic assassin Anthony Lamb (Toby Huss). It's gonna be a long night for Young and everyone else in this precinct as the bullets fly and allegiances shift on a dime.

It's easy to see why Copshop would be an enticing prospect to shoot during the era of COVID-19. Save for one scene early on where Young breaks up a scuffle outside of a casino, no scene in Copshop features more than three or four people at a time. It's certainly commendable that Carnahan and Kurt McLeod's screenplay commits to such a sparse aesthetic. Even the climax keeps things contained to just a handful of people shooting at each other in a locker room rather than blowing up the scope for the sake of incorporating larger explosions. Copshop is a movie about bad people talking trash and punching each other in the throat and none of the creatives involved forget that.

The downside to keeping the scope so restrained, though, is that sometimes those elements overstay their welcome. Running at 107 minutes, Copshop needed a trim in the editing room, particularly extended examples of comedic dialogue from Lamb that feel like the sort of overlong improvisations you'd find in a Judd Apatow movie. There are also not enough enjoyably oversized personalities in the first-half, which is all about building stuff up before the guns start firing, to make this dialogue-heavy section of the film compelling. It's obvious from the start whose good, whose bad, whose going to die first when wild card Lamb arrives. 

All of the unpredictable madness of prior Carnahan movies is missed in the more lethargic sections of Copshop. Thankfully, this filmmaker has assembled a solid enough cast to make sure things never sink to outright tedium. Gerard Butler, in particular, follows up his memorably madcap work in Den of Thieves with another committed goofy performance here as a guy whose personality swerves between evoking Jack Sparrow and Dirty Harry. It's the kind of role that plays to Butler's strengths as a performer and he makes for a fun musclebound adversary. Frank Grillo, meanwhile, isn't stretching himself beyond his typical screen persona and I kept wondering if a slightly more zany actor (Sharlto Copley maybe?) could've lent the role a touch more pizzazz. Most of the time Grillo's character is just stuck wandering around in a jail cell and Grillo doesn't quite rise to the challenge of being super engaging in such restrained confines.

The real standout of the cast, though, is Alexis Louder in her first major film role. She turns out to be more than capable of holding her own against the experienced likes of Butler and Grillo and it's cool that her performance doesn't fit tidily into the box of traditional action B-movie heroines. Her breakthrough performance gets saddled with some generic pieces of action filmmaking while the film she inhabits has a bad habit of, among other flaws, engaging in "edgy" humor (like an onslaught of fat jokes) that are more yawn-inducing than provocative. Copshop can't hit the heights of either past Carnahan movies or its own ambitions, which is a shame since Louder and Butler are clearly game for all this shlocky action movie mayhem. Maybe they should've just thrown in a flying tank...