"Copshop": review

Gerard Butler as Bob, having a moment

[Very minor spoilers.]

I can now see why so many critics said that "Copshop" surprised them. The beginning of the movie feels like another typical, Elmore Leonard-style, "bad guys are cool" scenario. You've got the hip music cuing you in to the fact that you're going to be watching something badass—music that goes from intense to something more subtly noirish as time goes on. You've got the typical cops-versus-con-men situation, plus the hired hitmen with distinct personalities. For maybe the first twenty minutes or so, you'll have the feeling you've seen this movie before, maybe several times.

But "Copshop," while not necessarily subverting expectations (I'm really starting to hate that phrase), certainly defies them. Released in 2021, directed by veteran Joe Carnahan ("Smokin' Aces," reviewed here; "Boss Level," reviewed here), and starring Alexis Louder, Frank Grillo, and Gerard Butler, "Copshop"—which is slang for a police station—mostly takes place in a remote, Western police station in which most of the cops are complacently unprepared for what's coming their way. The plot is fairly simple, and it even contains tense scenes reminiscent of a horror movie. The cops arrest Teddy Murretto (Grillo), a fixer who makes money arranging meetings between power players, but who has siphoned money from one party who hasn't taken kindly to being bilked. When we meet Teddy, he's on the run from this disgruntled party, a mob boss who has engaged some contract killers to take him down. In front of a casino, where a massive fight involving several dozen people is going on, Teddy strikes a police officer, a young veteran named Valerie Young (Louder), who arrests him. It turns out that Teddy wants to be arrested: being in jail will keep him safe from his assassins. But one assassin, Bob Viddick (Butler), pretends to be piss-drunk and gets himself arrested as well. He gets placed in a cell across from Teddy. It turns out that one cop in the station, Huber (Ryan O'Nan), is corrupt; he's trying to spirit out some drugs from the evidence locker, and he ends up working with a second assassin named Anthony Lamb (the hilariously scary Toby Huss), who is also gunning for Teddy but is obviously out of his mind. Much of the first half of the movie is quiet until Huss arrives and starts killing cops; the prisoners in the jail cells downstairs can hear the gunfire upstairs, and the situation turns into an intense negotiation with Valerie as Teddy and Bob both try to convince her to let them out of their cells so they can't be gunned down by crazy Lamb (who, we find out later, also has a bounty on his head).

It's a wacky scenario, but the movie pays attention to details that seem trivial at first but become important later on, so the entire chain of events isn't quite as nonsensical as it might seem. "Copshop" is a surprisingly slow and talky movie, but it does a very good job of building tension and—more importantly—building character. When people start to die, we've grown to care about them. These cops are real people, and only human. Many of the officers are doughy, out of shape, and kind of slow-moving, but they're not portrayed as bumbling idiots. Unfortunately, the cops' flawed humanity is what gets them in trouble, and they're unable to see real danger until it's too late. 

Until Teddy and Bob are brought in, it's been a slow night at the police station, and things really pick up once the chaotic force of Anthony Lamb arrives to shoot up anything and everything. Lamb spouts hilarious country-boy one-liners as he kills his way through the police station, and Valerie—the rookie on the team—is the only one with enough common sense to survive Lamb's initial onslaught, although she does make the mistake of accidentally shooting herself in the side with her .44 Magnum thanks to a ricochet off a bulletproof surface.

It might be tempting for right-leaning critics to step back and analyze the movie for its supposed racial politics: the movie's heroine is a young black woman with a strong moral compass and more horse sense than her colleagues. The villains are all white men, and she has to shoot her way through them. Maybe young Valerie is also something of a Mary Sue given her Jack Bauer-like ability to perceive danger where others don't. In truth, though, what the movie gives us is a flawed heroine who is no Mary Sue and who, in the end, doesn't make the big kill. In terms of racial politics, well, it turns out that another black female character is one of the bad guys, so the movie doesn't just give us nefarious white guys. I ended up rooting for Valerie, who had to survive a series of dire situations through wit and grit. Actress Alexis Louder is new to me, and I ended up thinking she was awesome. Her character exudes authority, intelligence, and conviction; I almost got a bit of a Ripley-from-"Aliens" vibe from her. I'll be curious to see her in other roles.

Gerard Butler and Frank Grillo both do a great job portraying complicated men. Grillo's con man exudes quiet desperation, and for some moments, we are even persuaded to think of him as a sympathetic character because he's aware his ex-wife and child are also being threatened. Butler's Bob Viddick says, at one point, that's he's a professional, not a psycho like Lamb, and he does seem very good at his job once he figures out how to get free. Butler is far from his role as the ripped King Leonidas in "300" (who can forget "This! Is! Sparta!"?): he's older, tired-looking, and a bit soft. But as solid as Grillo and Butler are, it's Toby Huss as deranged contract killer Anthony Lamb who steals every scene he's in. Huss plays Lamb as crazy but ruthless and methodical. He comes off almost like a horror-movie villain.

Butler and Grillo get top billing in the credits, but really, Alexis Louder ought to get top billing: she's our protagonist/heroine, and Louder carries the movie on her slight shoulders. She did a solid job in her role as a rookie living through a nightmare scenario. I'm currently trying to recall whether her character actually kills anyone in the movie. If Valerie didn't kill anyone, it wouldn't be for lack of trying. If I were to voice one other complaint about the movie, it's that the editing sometimes left me confused as to who got shot and how badly they'd been hurt. Some of this was obviously deliberate: once or twice, shot characters reappear after seemingly dying. But there were other moments that were genuinely confusing. This is a minor complaint about something that doesn't disturb the overall flow of the movie, but the problem was noticeable enough for me to comment on it.

"Copshop" keeps you guessing. If, at the thirty-minute mark, you were to take bets on who survives to the end of the film, you'd probably get a lot of those predictions wrong. Granted, 90% of the people we meet end up becoming cannon fodder, but as I noted above, the movie is dialogue-heavy enough to develop even minor characters, so each death feels like a real loss.

I ended up liking "Copshop" a lot on an artistic level. It took a well-worn genre and added its own twists to it. It gave us a police force that was flawed but recognizably human, not a bunch of doughnut-chomping idiots. It gave us assassins who were both witty and scary, and a desperate man on the run from the mob. It also gave us a plot that didn't insult the audience's intelligence, along with a solid, likable heroine who felt believably in danger without ever once becoming an invincible Mary Sue. "Copshop" was, for my money, entertainment done right. The ending might leave some people unsatisfied because it deliberately includes some major loose ends, but maybe that could be an excuse to make a sequel.