If this were a book, it’d be a lurid 1940s pulp thriller.
Actually, it’s still a lurid pulp thriller, albeit with 21st century levels of violence and an unrelenting barrage of gratuitous F-bombs. Sacramento-schooled writer/director Joe Carnahan has never been one for subtlety, having begun his career with gun- and testosterone-laden crime thrillers such as Blood, Guts, Bullets and Octane, Narc and Smokin’ Aces.
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| Small-town rookie cop Valerie Young (Alexis Louder) doesn't know it yet, but she's about to have a very, very bad night. |
Its genre placement aside, it’s also an ingenious example of claustrophobic, COVID-era filmmaking, as most of the action takes place within a single extensive interior setting. The premise — script by Carnahan, Kurt McLeod and Mark Williams — has vague echoes of 1976’s Assault on Precinct 13, which put John Carpenter on the map.
The execution sprays enough macho, attitude-laden testosterone to be bottled and sold retail.
Carnahan initially cross-cuts between two sets of events. The first is a routine — read: dull and boring — night shift at a small-town Nevada police station, where chatty rookie officer Valerie Young (Alexis Louder) stands out among her mostly white, disinterested and overweight colleagues. Elsewhere, the frantic Teddy Murretto (Frank Grillo) roars down the highway in a car laden with bullet holes, clearly trying to escape something not far behind him.
Valerie and her partner respond to a brawl that has disrupted a wedding; while separating the combatants, she’s sucker-punched — hard — by Murretto, who has just rushed to the scene. Naturally, he’s arrested, driven to the station and put in a cell … as he intended.
A few minutes later, another pair of officers drag in a disheveled, incoherent drunk who’s barely able to stand, let alone walk. He’s placed in the “drunk cell,” across the aisle from Murretto’s temporary cage.
Ah, but that’s no drunk. We’re not surprised, once they’re left alone, when he snaps to sharp-eyed awareness and faces Murretto with the feral anticipation of a lion about to devour a lamb. Meet professional assassin Bob Viddick (Gerard Butler), whose current contract is Murretto: a “fixer” for the Mob who got too greedy, and must be dealt with.
Viddick playfully taunts his prey, occasionally glancing at his watch, which is counting down the minutes to … what? Murretto, assuming himself safe in the cell, responds with superficial bravado.
Elsewhere in the station, unaware that all hell is about to break loose, Valerie banters with her colleagues. Station sergeant Mitchell (Chad L. Coleman) grouses that everybody is slagging off; the counter clerk fiddles with his computer; corpulent, pasty-faced Huber (Ryan O’Nan), behaving rather evasively, clearly is Bad News Of Some Sort.
Carnahan and editor Kevin Hale build a reasonable level of tension during this expository first act, which also sets the tone for the rest of the film; if the deliberately exaggerated macho posturing and attitude-laden tough talk seem silly during these early stages, you may as well check out … because it only becomes ever more so.
These aren’t characters; they’re archetypes. Butler has a long history of such aggressively physical roles, and he growls an epithet with persuasive menace. Grillo, in turn, makes Murretto a total slimeball; the more we learn about him, the more we’re willing to regard Viddick’s assignment as a righteous cause.
Louder’s Valerie, however, is the shining star in this crowd. She radiates authority, intelligence and just as much ball-busting intensity as her male colleagues. When she attempts to interview Murretto by suggesting they talk “man to man,” she means it. In short, Valerie is bad-ass; Louder plays her superbly, and she quickly becomes the hero we root for.
Unfortunately, Valerie also has a strong sense of fairness and the rule of law: admirable moral qualities that will be exploited against her.
Carnahan and his fellow writers gleefully tease us. Even after the balloon goes up, and the body count begins to climb, Murretto and Viddick still are trading taunts while locked in their respective cells … although the latter hasn’t exactly been idle.
Then things really get out of control, with the entrance of rival hit man Anthony Lamb (Toby Huss). Huss damn near steals the show, playing Lamb as a gleefully loquacious sociopath in the dark-comedy Tarantino mold. Carnahan lets him cut loose, and Lamb’s totally bonkers, stream-of-consciousness chatter makes him flat-out scary.
He’ll kill anybody en route to fulfilling his assignment. Viddick, in contrast, clearly Has Principles: a timeworn but always engaging cliché that exists only in crime fiction (although it does allow Butler to maintain his usually heroic rep by playing a sorta-kinda good bad guy).
Although what follows is executed with style, and makes excellent use of the building’s various rooms and corridors, the third act drones on much too long. Movies of this type should arrive at an economical 95 minutes; this one overstays its welcome at 108. And yes, those 13 minutes make a big difference; that’s why God invented editors.
On a different note, although Clinton Shorter is credited with the rather uninvolving score, the film’s title credits music is a direct lift of Lalo Schifrin’s theme from 1973’s Magnum Force, the second Dirty Harry film … a detail that isn’t acknowledged until Schifrin gets a teeny-tiny mention at the bottom of the end credits. (I do not approve.)
All told, Copshop isn’t the worst way to spend an evening … but it belongs in a Friday night streaming timeslot, not in a walk-in movie theater, where it’s likely to be ignored.
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