Copshop: Like Watching A Comic Book Come To Life

Sometimes, movies are subtle. Other times, the characters work at a police station in a town named Gun Creek. Hmmm, I wonder what's going to happen in Copshop. But despite it's immediately apparent lack of subtlety, Copshop is undeniably a lot of fun, a movie that almost got shut down by Covid, but thankfully overcame the difficulties of filming during such a time to deliver us a good old fashioned actioner with a couple of great setpieces that would use any excuse to showcase lots and I mean lots of guns. After all, the town it's set in is called Gun Creek, not Gluten Free Cruelty Free Baseball Bat Creek, no? In short, Copshop follows the mayhem that ensues when a con artist named Teddy Murreto (Frank Grillo) hides out from some killers at a police station, only for a hitman named Viddick (Gerard Butler) with Teddy's name punched gets himself intentionally locked up in the station as well with the goal of completing his mission. Oh, and other unsavory elements want in on the bounty on Murreto's head as well, futher complicating things for Valerie (Alexis Louder), the young but capable cop working at the station.

Copshop is a brash flick, the type where guns are the first option to solve a problem as well as the last, and I love the front-and-center gung-ho gunslinger personality of this movie. It shamelessly either pays homage to or flat-out steals from classic westerns, and it doesn't try to hide the fact from you, instead fixating on being as unabashedly fun as possible. It exists to entertain more than anything else, and so while Copshop is not without it's fundamental merits, it doesn't ever forget that it's supposed to be an enjoyable movie. Speaking of merits, I'm a big fan of how contained this movie is. It's set within the confines of a police station, and feels very much like a trap in the best of ways. Valerie can't escape what's coming. The only way out is through. This makes the movie an incredibly pressurized affair, not exactly unlike if someone took a pressure cooker and made bad decisions with it in the very best of ways.

The action and suspense sequences of Copshop are excellently shot and edited. They're visually outstanding and shamelessly bombastic. And perhaps most valuably, they're used surprisingly sparingly, and so they hit with a pretty amazing whallop as well. The probable highlight of the movie features a dark bathroom, a ton of shower steam, and a handful of dangerous killers. It's an incredibly tense scene, not to mention a remarkably well-staged one. Copshop knows when and how to play the cards it's been dealt in smart ways, far smarter than the drama surrounding the actual making of the movie, almost as if the writers used all of their brains up making the movie and left none for the area of public relations and actor-producer relations.

On the subject of downsides in the movie, maybe I just got spoiled by B.J. Novak's Vengeance, but the dialogue in Copshop is nonetheless quite one-dimensional. It doesn't contain any sense of distinctive character or intrigue, and all the characters just sort of talk the same way, spitting out the same, flat 80's action flick one-liners - with one big exception. Toby Huss as Anthony "Tony" Lamb is the performative saving grace of the cast of Copshop, bringing an excellent performance as a balloon-man-slash-psychopathic-hitman. He's strangely whimsical and yet entirely gleefully homicidal, but in a lot of ways, his standout performance just makes all the other performances seem all the more flat.

So, despite it's flaws, perhaps the most impressive thing about Copshop is how convincingly Gerard Butler plays something other than a soldier or a dad with some extra testosterone. But joking aside, this movie does do some things really well. It's limited scope and scale do it a lot of favors, and it's pressure-cooker approach is utilized to remarkably entertaining effect. It's not exactly close to being the deepest movie of all time, but it does have something special to it's name - the pulpy and unapologetic quality of a comic book. With that pulp comes a level of incompletion and inferiority to hard-boiled literary masterpieces, but nevertheless, the experience of watching it is entirely thrilling and viscerally gripping all the way through. Just read the comic book, man. No one reads War And Peace on a Friday night.

Copshop - 7/10

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